The Flowers that Bloom

I’ve been working professionally as a social worker for nearly 20 years. It’s not just what I do, but who I am, how I make sense of the world, and a part of how I define myself. After I out grew fantasies of wanting to be an actress in the 80’s sitcom Facts of Life (but let’s be real...I think that was mostly because I both had a crush on Jo and wanted to be Jo,) wanting to be a social worker is all I can remember.  When I was a teenager, a childhood friend of mine struggled with mental health challenges.  While visiting her in the hospital I think the 1st seeds of becoming a social worker were planted.  

I was given the opportunity to work as an intern in a school for students who lived in residential treatment while I was in high school. This eventually lead to my summer job throughout college.  Each year I would return to Detroit and work as a direct care staff with boys who had been abused, neglected, and passed around from placement to placement.  Despite being a “short-term” placement, Greg had been there since he was 3. I think he turned 13 my last summer there.  His smile would light up his entire face, but after being institutionalized for 10 years the only way he knew how to manage his feelings of abandonment was physical management.  Hugging him in the form of a basket-hold became the norm.  Even in an environment that was supposed to feel safe, Greg associated love with violence.

Through another part-time job, I was there when Roy and his younger brother and sister, were removed from their parents’ custody.  I stayed at the foster-care agency until after 11pm that night, feeding them dinner and struggling to comfort them while they waited for the uncertain future of where they would go next.  The following summer I learned these same 3 siblings were living at the residential treatment facility where I also worked.  The two younger siblings were eventually placed into foster care, but Roy was “too old” to be placed and spent at least the next couple of years in residential care.  He was the 1st of many teenagers over time to curl up and take residence in a corner of my heart.  I took him to art classes off campus and played basketball with him when other boys were on home visits with their families.  The last time I saw Roy, was at his football game. He was 16.  I think of him often and wonder about his life.

This is when I fell in love with social work. It was still early in my career, before I knew much about theory, termination, and boundaries. But I knew, deep beneath my layers that the world seemed more right when I was giving.  I grew up with an abundance of love, and sharing the overflow with others just made sense. It wasn’t until the latter years of college, when a thin man with gray, straggly, shoulder-length hair, who looked more like he should be holding a “make love not war” sign than teaching a college course, walked into my life that I also understood how systemic racism and white privilege create these injustices.  He helped me understand that social work can’t just be about “helping the poor,” but that it must also be about social change, otherwise it too is perpetuating the status quo.

I’ve been working as a social worker at my current job for 7.5 years, the longest I’ve worked anywhere.  In the last couple of years I have occasionally wondered if, after 20 years it’s time to spend my time differently.  I’ve recently explored my love for photography and awakening this creative energy makes me feel alive.  Perhaps I should consider a new path.  And then I walk through the neighborhood where I work and I see the mothers of students who are now in college greeting me with stories of their children, or a teenage boy whose conversations with adults are typically about being in trouble, stops by regularly to talk as though he is a butterfly landing just long enough to be reminded he is beautiful.  A high school student recently sat down with some much younger boys after overhearing them speak disrespectfully about others and explained, “This place is my home.  This is where I literally run to when I’m in trouble and I need support.  I would never come into your home and speak disrespectfully, please do the same for me.”  

Last night I worked late with 2 student leaders, (well 1, the other is now officially a staff member,) who care enough to clean and organize, the otherwise falling apart space to remind the students returning from summer break that they deserve something nice. While we worked, I had a conversation about food deserts and the difference between Walmart and Whole Foods.  They wanted to know if “a lot, a lot” of people shop at Whole Foods and if they sell junk food and TV’s like Walmart.  We talked about how racism is not just about the way people treat you, but it also affects the quality of grocery stores in your neighborhood, or if there are even stores at all.  There are also days when a student looks me in the eyes and says, “you don’t know anything about me or what it’s like to be black,” and all I can tell her is “you are right.”  I don’t know what’s it’s like to be black, or brown, or to be poor, or for English to be my 2nd language, or to worry about my children being shot, or how it feels not to be able to see my family because they live in Mexico.  All I can say is, “you are right.”

Sometimes social work is about theory and therapeutic interventions and during those times the letters behind my name come in handy.  Other times its about it’s about offering a safe space for families while they work hard to survive in a system designed to see them fail, and perhaps most importantly, sometime social work is about taking responsibility.  I don’t know if I will work professionally as a social worker for another 20 years, but I do know I could never take advantage of the freedom my privilege affords me and live a life pretending others’ struggles do not affect my life or that my lack of struggle does not affect theirs.  So although over the years I have gained the trust and in some cases the acceptance in a neighborhood so far from my own, I do not forget the flowers that bloom here do not bloom because of me, but rather, they bloom in spite of me and the dominant culture I represent.

In Solidarity

Today I read an article that reported 72 people were shot in Chicago during the 4th of July weekend and 12 of those people were killed.  That weekend of staggering violence prompted an emergency summit on gun violence in Chicago: http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/07/25/gun-violence-in-chicago-black-leaders-convene-emergency-summit/.  As of Wednesday (7/24/13) there have been 226 murders this year in the city of Chicago.  As of today there now have been at least 227 murders.  For those of you familiar with National Public Radio’s This American Life (TAL), you may have heard the story documenting the lives of students attending Harper High School, where last year alone 29 students were shot.  TAL reporters spent... “five months at Harper High School in Chicago, to get a sense of what it means to live in the midst of all this gun violence, how teens and adults navigate a world of funerals and Homecoming dances.”  http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/487/harper-high-school-part-one.  This evening TAL reported, “a sophomore named Darryl Green was found dead behind an abandoned building just four blocks west of the school. Chicago Police and the medical examiner’s office say he’d been killed by a gunshot wound to the head. He was 17. “  

When I left work tonight, I stopped by a neighborhood barbecue hosted by the on-line school located on the other side of the building from my office.  Several students I work with also attended the event.  Additionally, there was a baby-faced 16 year old student who looked like any other teenager, except for the nervous energy he exuded as he paced back and forth in front of the school.  A rival gang in the area, has put a hit out on him.  They’ve ordered him dead.  While people were eating hot dogs and eagerly waiting to see if their raffle ticket would be drawn for a gift card to the nearby grocery store, I noticed it.  We were being stalked.  In all my years of working with youth in communities with a high concentration of gangs, this was the first time the hair on the back of my neck stood up from the danger in the air.  For the fist time ever, I briefly felt the uneasiness that most of the young people I work with feel daily. Older teenage boys slowly walked by in groups of 2 and 3, from all sides of the block.  Cars rolled by, pausing for long dramatic stares.  Students I typically only see in leadership roles were on high alert applying their leadership skills in a different way, scanning the streets for approaching enemies without missing a beat in conversation.

I surveyed the scene, people were sitting at tables, old and young.  Many of them looked weathered from a life of struggle.  There were young children running around laughing, several of whom were younger siblings of students I’ve known for many years. I often make lunch for these children for during the long summer days and I’ve grown to care about them like family.  Then, as if I didn’t have control of my own thoughts, I imagined it, I imagined a shooting breaking out, right there on the corner where I was standing, where a community was finding respite from the heat and I wanted to leave.  The risk of violence was so close I could taste it and yet the only thing I was swallowing was my privilege.  I could get in my car and drive away.  I would be safe and I could focus on my plans to run in the mountains and go climbing over the weekend.  Instead, I chose to stay, at least for a little while, and stand in solidarity with a community that can’t leave.

I don’t understand a world where the lives of young people are not all valued. I don’t know how to reconcile the national coverage mass shootings in white, affluent communities receive that inspire waves of overwhelming support while shootings that occur en masse in low-income black and latino communities are normalized.  I feel helpless, sad, and angry.  This kind of violence is a direct consequence of white privilege, economic privilege, and institutional racism.  I don’t understand why we are not all in the streets, outraged and protesting until young lives are no longer a casualty of this war.

A Tibetan Heart

I was gone just 3 weeks, but I lived a lifetime during those 3 weeks and returned home with peacefulness rooting from the center of my core.  My days were filled with getting reacquainted with old friends, meeting new friends, monasteries, Tibetan farmhouses, monks, festivals, children, hard work, and momos.  Returning to Tibet feels like coming home.  Yet, being in Tibet is a paradox. It is the most spiritual of all places, but the fear of oppression is palpable...

After the Chinese invasion, more than 6,000 monasteries were destroyed in Tibet. 

I didn’t need to speak Mandarin to understand the cab driver was belittling my friend in the front seat, who had quickly become like a sister to me.  Outrage began to rise through me, but I resisted the urge to step in and say something.  I sat silently, not because I couldn’t speak the language; I was confident I could convey my indignation with just the tone of my voice.  Instead, I sat silently because the law was not on our side. I felt like I was bound and gagged in the backseat.  Confronting the cab driver would only create problems for my friend.  

She looked over her shoulder with an apologetic expression and explained, the driver took us to the wrong destination and insisted it was her mistake.  First he told her, “you minorities shouldn’t take cabs...you should get out and catch the bus because you don’t have the money to pay for this,” insinuating my friend was trying to manipulate the driver to avoid paying for the cab ride.  After speaking with the person working at the front desk of our hotel, who gave him the same directions as did my friend, the driver said, “it’s your tones...you don’t speak clearly enough. I couldn’t understand you.”  In the same breath he insisted she would have to pay the full fare, more than double the rate it would have otherwise cost because it was her fault he got lost.

   

It is estimated that one million Tibetans have died as a result of the Chinese occupation, through imprisonment, torture and executions. 

When we arrived at or hotel, we got out of the taxi and my friend paid the driver.  I offered to cover the fare, but she wouldn’t allow this, explaining she would get reimbursed by the NGO that employs her.  I was frustrated and uncomfortable with my inherent helplessness.  I am not accustomed to being a bystander when witnessing racism. I asked my friend how she copes with being passive and silent while encountering prejudice daily.  I was trying to understand another way.  My friend surprised me by saying, “this makes me so angry.”  I had not previously heard my Tibetan friends discuss their anger.  They all seem so good at letting go of attachment, I just assumed they had mastered not feeling angry.  My friend explained that in spite of her anger, she finds compassion for the Chinese cab driver because reacting to him will not create change, particularly in China’s political climate. 

She went on to tell me a story from her childhood about her mother, who she described as “hot headed.”  Her mother was gathering water in a bucket when a Chinese man walked by kicked the bucket over.  Her mother was so angered by this, she went to his home and confronted the man in front of his family.  The man called the police and she was arrested.  My friend learned at an early age the consequences of standing up for her rights in China.  She admitted she doesn’t want to stay “here,” in Chengdu.  She would rather return to her home in Lhasa to be with her mother; in a place that feels more welcoming, but for now she says she is gaining experience.

My friend has travelled a great distance for this "experience."  She walked across the Himalayas at age 8 to get an education in India. She went back to Tibet by walking across the Himalayas again at 18, and she was locked up after getting caught crossing the boarder home.  Yet along the way she did not lose her Tibetan heart.

“It is lack of love for ourselves that inhibits our compassion toward others.  If we make friends with ourselves, then there is no obstacle to opening our hearts and minds to others.”

In the Company of Glaciers

“A Man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificant by and by.”     ~Mark Twain

I have always felt a sense of freedom and peace in wide open spaces.  It is here, walking along jagged peaks and soaking up orange sunsets in the desert where I feel most alive.  Yet, I struggle to think of myself a serious adventurer.  Living in Boulder, where so many professional, outdoor athletes live or pass through, I feel like I am simply dipping my toes into the outdoors.  I am surrounded by people who climb big walls and even bigger mountains for a living.  There is no shortage of inspiration and I am learning to find my place in this expansive world of adventure.  Exploring Iceland brought me one step closer to feeling like a true explorer.

Iceland is the yin and yang of fire and ice.  Sparkling glaciers tower over black volcanic rock and everything else seems to fade away.  Hiking the trail that snaked around the moraine, the gravity of the glacier pulled me closer so I could hear the history of the earth unfolding.  As we approached, David wanted to get on the glacier and climb around.  I so deeply wanted to take the risk and feel what it’s like to walk with millions of years of history beneath me but I have this innate cautiousness that I battle more often than I’d like.  

I don’t have any mountaineering experience and the inherent danger of ice and crevasses intimidates me.  As we grew closer, we put on our micro-spikes and David immediately ran out onto the frozen lake in front the the glacier and I pulled out my camera.  While I was shooting I felt conflicted about wanting to be out there too and feeling afraid of being in the center of a presumably frozen glacial lake.  With David’s encouragement, the ice won.  The first couple of steps were nerve-wracking, the ice was fragile and I could hear it crackling under my feet; but with each step my confidence grew and the risk was outweighed by how exhilarated I felt.  I’m not sure which felt more liberating, being on the ice or breaking free of my tendency to be cautious.

photo by David Garcia

Climbing onto the glacier, I felt grounded and connected to the universe in a way I have only known a few times in my life.  I felt roots growing through my feet and sinking deep beneath me. I wanted to go everywhere and nowhere.  Walking around the base of the glacier, I quickly found impermanence in the midst of false certainty when my left leg, and then my right let went through the ice and plunged into frigid water.  Quicker than my brain could process, with camera in hand, I caught myself on the edge of the ice and was standing upright, unharmed....wet, and with a throbbing shin, but otherwise unharmed.  I don’t know how I pulled myself up. I’ve replayed it again and again in my mind, but I can’t recall the details.  I just know for the first time in my life I learned that I do, in fact, have survival instincts and this was somehow relieving.  I feel braver, less fragile knowing I don’t always have to rely on others to keep me safe.  Thanks to the adrenaline pumping through me and wool long-underwear, we were able to continue our exploration. 

Walking amidst ice so turquoise, it looked like the frozen Caribbean sea, I felt the importance of my insignificance.  Tip-toeing to the edge of a crevasse I could have disappeared into the infinite darkness while standing on what seemed like forever.  The wilderness has a way of reminding me of the impermanence of everything so that I remember to hold what I love most, a little closer, for as long as I can.

“No art can reproduce such colors as the deep blue of the iceberg.”  ~Robert Falcon Scott

Weightless

"Standing still is never an option so long as inequities remain 

embedded in the very fabric of the culture.”     Tim Wise

One of the aspects I most love about working with cityWILD is the opportunity to work with young people and their families for multiple years. Imagine the kind of transformation that can occur between the ages of 11 and 18. This month I celebrate 7 years of working with cityWILD and during this time I have been given the gift of supporting some of the most extraordinary young people as they defeat odds to rise above obstacles most people in my life can’t imagine.  I have been working in the field of social work for more than 20 years.  The barriers that go hand in hand with poverty are painfully familiar to me, but not because I know anything about what it feels like to walk barefoot on the hot coals.  Rather, because I have witnessed the impacts of poverty, oppression, and racism over and over again. Yet, even after 20 years I am still learning how much I don’t know.

Not long ago I stopped into a bookstore, the kind with coffee and couches that invite people to linger while browsing the aisles and flipping through magazines. These kind of bookstores are one of the places where I feel most at peace.  On this occasion, I had an 17 year old student with me and unbeknownst to me, this was the first time this student had ever been inside of a bookstore.  As we walked through, it became apparent the student didn’t know such a place existed.  As we talked, the student had no idea people could take books off the shelves and sit down to read or that it would be fine to hang out for the afternoon and study without buying anything.  As much as I think about inequity, it had never occurred to me that someone could grow up 2 miles from where I was living and not know what a book store is. If I could overlook this, I wonder how many other privileges I don’t see each and every day.

The truth is, regardless of how many students with whom I work get straight A’s, take AP classes, go on Outward Bound courses, learn to be rafting guides, complete service learning projects, travel out of the country, and go to college, they will still struggle for justice in a world stacked against them.

I volunteer for an organization that partners with privates schools with tuition costing as much as $20,000 per year.  This is not college tuition, this is tuition for kindergarten through 12th grade.  $20,000 is more than most of the families in the neighborhood where I work make. When people are raising families on less than $20,000 per year, (often much less,) there is a lot more than bookstores to which their children aren't exposed. The advantages of privilege are so multi-layered sometimes it feels nearly impossible to quantify. 

Since that day at the bookstore, I find myself reflecting on the rituals of my day and wondering how many of them are rooted in privilege I have yet to recognize.  It’s a heavy burden to realize I have so many unearned advantages that I can’t identify them all.  Yet, this burden seems weightless compared to the weight of the struggle people without these advantages carry each day of their lives.

"In my class and place, I did not recognize myself as a racist because I was taught to see racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth."   Peggy McIntosh