It's been very hard to focus on writing for the past few days. This has meant that it has been hard to focus on everything else, as well. There are personal reasons for the difficulties in focus, which I would rather not dwell on. I kind of just want to push through and keep going, even though I feel a sort of chill engulfing me.
Writing has become such a routine in my life that when I am unable to do it on some semblance of a regular schedule, nothing else seems to work out either. This is different from the kind of day when an 8 a.m. meeting or an unexpected morning phone call interrupts coffee and morning pages, or when the overly long meeting or sudden need to deal with a home issue cuts into a scheduled bout of writing time. This week, the blocks of time were available, and the plans were clearly laid out. I would awake early and write, go for a workout, grade student work in the afternoon, and come home for an early dinner and my evening words. This is the balanced routine that really works when I am able to make it work. It makes me feel that I can live up to my personal manifesto of being a writer that includes such phrases as feeling "happy, healthy, and whole" and as being "dedicated to daily writing and happy when I have written." I look forward to the slower paced times of the year -- ends of semesters, summer breaks, holidays, and faculty reading periods -- when I can live out what I believe.
Life takes different courses, however, and part of the role, I think, of being a writer is to roll with those punches. It means answering the phone when it's 7 a.m. and it's your sister because you know and your sister knows that morning writing is really important and that she wouldn't call unless it was important. It means dealing with the fact that if your brow weren't creased with worry and your guts weren't turning upside down inside of you because your mother was having an emergency surgery at age seventy-eight, you wouldn't be able to be a writer because you wouldn't be human. This, perhaps, redefines the school of hard knocks just slightly.
I've been thinking a lot about the poetics of sustainability over the past few days, and the varied experiences in the three workshops and two other events that we hosted in April. Poetry and drawing dominated the workshops, as did discussions of what it meant to step out of your immediate world and to put yourself into communion with art, free writing and nature. I was amazed at how people responded to the workshop. My colleague said, "It was as if they were hungering for something they couldn't define." I couldn't define it either, and still cannot. I think about the work that does get done and that doesn't get done, and about how my efforts to move people forward with mentoring and teaching sometimes result in them and/or me going two steps backward. But then when I write I slide into a meditative space, where it does seem that every effort is a good step forward.
I also thought today about intersectionality, in terms of where class and race intersect. I am a professor. People don't know that by looking at me, but there's enough streaks of gray in my hair and my car is unstylish enough despite its plastering of bumper stickers for Obama, farmers markets, and local farming in general that one glance at me probably does leave an impression that I am a geek of some type. Geek can be code for educated, for middle class. Anyway, I had parked my car in a space at the grocery store and opened the door. I then heard an angry voice bellow at me to stop scratching his car with my door. Hurriedly, I looked up and saw an SUV in the space beside me and a young, red-faced man shaking a fist at me. Quickly, I closed my door and apologized. He glared at me and yelled some more. I apologized again. He revved up his engine, and mouthed what seemed like it could have been a racial slur, glared at me again and started to drive off, turning around every so often to glare at me some more.
By this point, I was pissed off. I was really mad. I don't think my car door had even touched his car. It certainly didn't scratch it. As he turned back for one more glare, I gave him the finger. Twice, for good measure. I found myself mouthing a slur, as well, a classist slur.
And, as I went into the grocery store, it struck me that this was intersectionality. Based on appearances and appearances alone, I was a brown-skinned foreigner with the middle-class trappings of one who would shop at farmers markets and support Obama. He was a white male, young, angry, tattooed, and righteously working class. I couldn't possibly afford the cost of the gas it would take to fill the vehicle he was driving, but that was beside the point. I was being uppity, and because I perceived him to be of a lower educational class than myself and of a lower professional class, I got mad.
I started to wonder, what might have been the situation if it had been a white male of a similar class as myself. How might I have reacted to the incident?
It hit me that I would have reacted with shame. I would have presumed that I was in the wrong, regardless of whether I was or not. I would have let gender, race, and class privilege walk all over me, and I would feel anxious for my actions.
I tried to rationalize the incident as I walked through the grocery store, gathering my goods. Everybody has bad days, I thought, and maybe he just needed to vent. Nobody's car was damaged, and if there had been real damage, I most certainly would have taken responsibility. But I couldn't get the anger out of my mind.
And so perhaps that it is the space where we end for the night. It is something I would like to mull over a little more. Well, one more thought.
A man in our neighborhood used to be a pretty good friend. Last fall, he came over and started mouthing off about how the recently passed Safe Act gun-control legislation was going to cause the government to come and get his guns. My husband and I tried to tell him that the government wasn't interested in his guns and that the law was aimed at stemming the tide in school shootings and other acts of youth violence. The man's voice escalated and he started blaming schools and colleges for spreading untruths, and Obama for taking away his health insurance, and before we knew it, he walked out, slamming the door to our 175-year-old house so hard that it felt as if the walls shook. He didn't speak to us for several weeks, and then tried to come over and act like nothing had happened. I felt like I was in a difficult spot. I felt that it was up to him to apologize for disrupting our day but that he was waiting for us to apologize to him for being middle class educated liberals. Which was odd because economically we were in even worse shape than he. We live paycheck to paycheck. We rarely go out. We pour most of our income that remains after the mortgage and bills are paid and our groceries are taken care of into the operation of our small family farm. It is a farm that feeds us, a few people at a local food bank, and generates no other source of revenue. It is our pride and joy.
These are easier things for me to talk about, to write about. Perhaps it's because even though they are important they hit a little less close to home.
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