Conversation Starters

It is doing that March-weather thing outside today: big, fat snowflakes that dissolve as soon as they hit the pavement.  I gotta admit: there's something sort of joy-inducing about the beauty of these fluffy white blobs descending from the heavens while knowing full well nary a shovel will need to be employed.  Certainly, we're nowhere near the point where we're ready to bust out the beach balls and the swimsuits but we're creeping ever closer to the in-between where those kinds of daydreams drift closer to upcoming reality. Spring in Ohio, folks.  This is it. I enjoyed this day from the comfort of my work-from-home setup, a glorious space that I have grown to adore.  It's this funny flip of the script in my life, this capacity to be able to do my job in the same place where I live.  For so much of my adult life, I lived in apartments with one to three other people (and their cats -- their many, many cats) and the thought of  work from home  not only s...

Yesterday one of my friends was telling me about how her mom -- let's call her Samantha -- seemed to be over-complicating her ability to get vaccinated against COVID-19.  Samantha has been ultra-cautious during the pandemic, staying very informed about the latest news, really taking the entire situation seriously.  Because of her age, she now qualifies to be vaccinated and by all stretches of the imagination, there are no major barriers for her to get said-vaccination: she is able-bodied, she has transportation, she has a strong local support system, including a partner to be with her or help her monitor any possible side-effects.   All she has to do is book her appointment and go .  But something seems to be stopping her.  She has lots of excuses for why she can't do it or why it's a cumbersome process or why it's too frustrating.  My friend shared this story about Samantha with me because, well, we're close friends, but also, I'm close with her mom....

In her book Teaching to Transgress , feminist writer, activist, and academic bell hooks speaks of educators as having the potential to be healers: to heal themselves, to heal their students, to create a better, more curious, and certainly more inspirational world.  Her writing reflects on how she grew up in the 1950’s when desegregation landed her in the culture shock of having all-Black classmates and teachers to mostly white and how that changed her relationship with education, something she loved so dearly.  She writes, “That shift from beloved, all-black schools to white schools where black students were always seen as interlopers, as not really belonging, taught me the difference between education as the practice of freedom and education that merely strives to reinforce domination” (hooks, 2014, p. 4).  For hooks, the classroom became a battleground from very early on and it wasn’t until she stumbled upon the teaching of Paulo Freire and Thich Nhat Hanh that she star...

I've pulled a few things from social media that I thought could inspire different posts, but as I stare at them off to the side here, my brain wants to call them pieces of the same puzzle.   The first one is this: Then there's this: Finally, there's this: That last one is obviously from a Timehop of mine -- a quote from an episode of  This American Life  that bangs like a drum through my healing process:  Sometimes we're not ready to let go of the lie that preservers our existence .  Yes, Ira Glass.  Yes, sir. But that sentiment ties back to the notion of the first meme I shared:  so many broken children in adult bodies .  For where else do we learn that we're less-than besides our childhoods? Where else do these patterns get established and engrained?  Where else are we told more that  we are resilient  than in our childhoods?  Kids just bounce back.  They're too young to understand.  What we say or do now will ...

  It is incredible how quickly a trauma can change the brain. That which was once benign, normal, unnoticeable, perhaps even loved, can send the body into such a state of panic and alarm just upon sight or smell or sound or touch. The brain will tell the body to run or fight or freeze. The body will be unable to make a different choice. That is trauma. Many things can be the root of trauma — abuse, violence, a singular moment that “changes everything.” Maybe it’s the flash-bang impact of a car crash, maybe it’s years and years of verbal degradation. Once the brain and the body team up to “protect” you from re-living that harm, you may find yourself seizing up or reacting viciously to something as innocent as the smell of apple pie or a random song on the radio. It might not always be the “obvious” things, like revisiting the place of the accident or standing in the room where something violent happened to you or going to see the doctor that once had to give you bad news. Sometimes ...

In the past couple of months (let's call them Quarantine), I've averaged daily walks of about seven and a half miles.  Often that's broken up into two sessions: a mid-morning and an evening stroll.  They're not high impact -- there's a lot of literal stopping to smell the flowers and stare at a cool cloud formation or wonder at the expanding wildlife I'm discovering in this inner-ring Cleveland pseudo-suburb.  While I walk and contemplate the beauty of the world around me, I listen to podcasts.  God knows how many I've blazed through during this bountiful alone-time.  It probably helps me feel more connected, honestly, because many of the podcasts I enjoy are conversational:  You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes  and  Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend   and  WTF with Marc Maron  -- even the more political automatic downloads, like  Love It or Leave It  (hands down the best podcast in the current rotation) or  Pod Save A...