Relationships and Storytelling

Our work is based on relationships and storytelling. 

Community-building. 

Storytelling builds the relationships, empathy, compassion, identification, solidarity.

Relationships generate the stories.  Retelling the stories reinforces the relationship.

Concilience, Reconciliation

In my dissertation methodology and conclusion, I wrote about the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation.

I'm aware that re-conciliation, looks like it has a root with concilience,

My work with regenerative ag/Quivira coalition led me to the word concilience in relation to resilience--knowledge systems working together.

In my work with researching feminist epistemologies, where was concilience?  How might I reconcile ontologies?

Blogging as first drafting...

June allows for some time to structure my adoption story, so here I pre-write some ideas (pre-writing is writing).

Part of the story is about human trafficking, abortion

inherited privilege

relationship to my dissertation research, writing with, writing against

naming structures

military and paternalist structures

thinking with Handmaid's Tale

I'm _________ years old.

[  ]  old enough to not want to begin a pregnancy at this age.
[  ]  a grown damn woman who has my birth control plan on point.
[  ]  experiencing intermittent periods, but not fully accepting that I'm perimenopausal, so wondering if I should take a pregnancy test.
[  ]  all of the above.

I'm here for this purge.

All the people who "made a joke" at a woman's expense 40 years ago--them too.

Voluntarily head to the nearest exit.

If you are an elected official, give your constituents a chance to re-elect you ONLY if they demand it, years from now after you have re-earned their trust.

Instead, spend time in your district listening to young leaders with whom you normally habitually haven't interacted.  Who among them needs a nudge, your mentorship, door opening, and millions of dollars of fundraising experience?  Help that person to replace your seat in Congress. 

Create and support a pipeline of these diverse young leaders, to replace you, yes, but to also use your influence to create the more perfect union in our communities and through government. You used your power and influence and frankly the structures of the patriarchy, racism, etc to nudge your way ahead in line, ahead of their mothers and fathers.  Give this diverse young generation of leaders the direct support they need to build the structures and new systems that we all need to navigate the future:  to support aging boomers, in an increasingly automated age, while developing post-carbon infrastructure and more equitable social systems and processes.

Surely you know that you can be both the problem and the solution.  Your money derived from the crumbling paradigm funds the new leaders so they are not beholden to gun lobby or pharmaceuticals or whatever other money makes it so even the best politicians cannot actually vote in their constituents' voice.

The problem, the hurt.  The women who were humiliated by your "joke" were hurt by you.  As Cohen says in her tweet "it's deliberate gender-based public humiliation of a colleague."  Those women you intentionally humiliated were hurt.  And also the young women and girls who witnessed the humiliation--either directly from you, or from hearing their aunts or sisters or mothers or community members talking about the humiliation.  Some of these women later chose to avoid working around powerful mean people like you, which incidentally often means doing lower paid work, because of you and your behavior.  And all the men who laughed.  And all the boys who watched.  And all the women who laughed.  And all the girls who watched.  They're all hurt by your behavior too.

Atonement means fixing  the things you broke, including relationships you didn't even know you had. 

This this the conversation I've been waiting for.  These are the actions we deserve.

If you genuinely don't understand the Black Lives Matter thing, step aside.  Let others who better understand serve in office instead.

If you genuinely don't understand the transgender thing, step aside.  Let others who better understand serve in office instead.

If you genuinely don't understand the water protectors, step aside.  Let others who better understand serve in office instead.

If you genuinely don't understand the million other perspectives we'd be better off having represented in our government, step aside.  Let others who do understand serve in office instead.

That's better than issuing an apology.  Be the leader who learns and repairs and empowers and survives and is redeemed. 

confronting our White privilege, a text conversation

He: Remember that one time you beat me with the stick of inappropriate perspectives of privilege and power?  That was fun :) [self-deprecation]

Me: I'm drafting a blog post about it. I'm thinking White people need to frequently check our privileges and become even more outspoken because silence to those who haven't been educated/exposed appears like we endorse these horrific White supremacist daily onslaughts.  Good morning :)

He: Can you keep the who's/what's confidential?

Me: lol yes.  Not naming names/outing people who aren't ready.  But there is power in coming out about privilege and may we all experience that sort of liberty.

He:  Indeed.

Me: I think the uncomfortable direction we White people need to move in is to acknowledge that we are mediocre. That there *are* more qualified women/transgender/people with disabilities/PoC that *should* be in well-paid positions of power and authority. Which we currently hold because of unearned privilege. If the alt-righties and young people who haven't heard any different heard smart, powerful White people say this they may have to question the stream of garbage that spews from some media sources about immigrants and lgbt and feminists making their lives hard.

He: I mostly agree with you.

Me: Help me see the error in my ways.

He: It's a matter of semantics.  And words matter.  There are more qualified PoC, women, people w/ disabilities that should be in well paid positions of authority.  And can we get there without making less (mediocre) of well meaning White male cis folks?  The assumption I'm challenging is that all PoC, people w/disabilities, queer folx, are more competent than all CIA [cis?] normative White men.  I also hold that cisnormative White men were told that we are more special, more competent, more deserving of power and that we need to actively combat that perspective, which is what I think you are reflecting with the mediocre statement.

Me:  I did not say *all* non White/cis/male/able are more competent.  I'm saying "on the average", read, not personal to you, there are a large quantity of mediocre White people, myself included, who have benefited from these biases.  To answer your (perhaps rhetorical) question, no.  I think we can't just say that every thing will get better without pointing out that there are dare i say too many White/cis/male/Christian people gumming up the system, especially those who are ignorant, willfully ignorant, of their privilege and how they continue to reproduce privilege.

He: yep.

Me: and also we really are mediocre.  We are not special, uniquely qualified, etc.  To presume otherwise is literally supremacist.  Mediocre meaning average, ie assuming we're always above average, Lake Woebegone effect.

He:  I'm struggling with that part.

Me: I know. You've been told you're special all your life.  Prizing male children over female children, etc.  I'm probably not the first to tell you, but maybe it's first sinking in for you.

He: I know I'm not innately special.  I know I am average on average.  I also know that each of us has individual areas of excellence and can train to become better qualified.

Me: Lol but you're not quite ready to embrace "mediocre" even though "average" is a synonym... because Whiteness is always presumed to be better than.  And that's uncomfortable.

He: Average on average is different than mediocre in my understanding and that has nothing to do with my Whiteness.

Me: Uh huh. 

Seeds bind us to place: panel at the 2017 Appalachian Studies Conference audio file

Click this link to listen to/download an audio file of the 1.5 hour panel discussion about seed libraries.  Speakers include Dave Walker, Cody Miller, William Ritter, and me, Karen Lemke.