New blog

I'm playing in another blogosphere.

Dear handful of readers, will you come find me over here?

http://wp.me/p1tDah-1I

Mirroring

Sometimes you just need a different pad of paper.

http://maypops.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/digging-38/

what the garden does

... is pay you back for showing up.

if you go every day – to water, deadhead, weed – you don't only see the fruits of your labor, you can taste them.

Thinking Pink: Listening beyond the noise

When the topic is women's healthcare, I often feel like I'm standing on bare ground between two warring castles.
Blazes of gunpowder and noise and fiery light fill the air overhead. Unyielding voices shout loudest from the ramparts, drowning out the quieter, more thoughtful points of view on both sides. Torches are hurled from one wall to the other. Each side wants to win.
On the ground in between, you have to make your own path. With all the flares above, it's harder to see the gentler lights that can help you find your way.
On the face of it, you'd think the topic of healthcare would be as benign for women as it is for men. But because you can't talk about women's health without talking about their reproductive systems – and everyone has an opinion about what they should and shouldn't be able to do; or about what "healthcare" means when it's about women – it has become next to impossible to have a civil conversation about it.
Today's news that the country's biggest breast cancer advocacy group has been spending considerable time and money on issues beyond breast cancer research and "finding a cure" – has, in fact, been seeking to divide women, for political gain – has whipped up the frenzy yet again.
A genuinely surprised American public rose up, flooding the Internet with rage and shock and an outpouring of support for the women's healthcare group that has, for more than 60 years, been providing free or low-cost care for all women, regardless of their ability to pay.
While I wade into this latest firestorm a little reluctantly, with flak jacket and hip boots on, I can't stay silent.
In 2002, I did the 3-day Breast Cancer Walk in the name of friends and relatives who had died from breast cancer, or were newly diagnosed. I wore their names on my shirt and kept them in the front of my mind every time I got tired or sore or thought I couldn't go on. It was the Avon Walk then -- but it's become the Komen Walk, so I consider myself an alumna of the original, and deeply concerned about how it evolves. In my 20s, when I would drop out of college (forfeiting student health services) every few months so I could work full-time at the first newspaper to win my time and love (dramatically prolonging the time it took to graduate), I relied upon Planned Parenthood for all my health-care needs. They would always see me; whatever my immediate concern, they never turned me away, keeping me and many of my friends healthy and supplied with birth control at a time when few of us had insurance.
I see no contradiction in considering myself Pro-Life and Pro-Choice, and feel only deep sorrow at how far apart good women have become on the topic of our life and health, and frustration at those who continue to seek to divide us with shorthand labels that insult the nuances of our lives and beliefs.
So I'm remembering the cornerstone of what I learned in newspapers, which is: When in doubt about an issue, read from as many sides of the conversation as you can bear.
Spend some time thinking for yourself.
Helpful questions to keep in mind, while you do:
What's at stake for the major players here?
When you follow the money trail for each party – who is spending the most, and why – where does it lead?
When you look at the extreme sides of each argument – i.e., who is most interested in shouting into the megaphone and least interested in listening, or having that old-fashioned civic enterprise known as a Real Conversation – what do you find?
Don't turn off your brain for any principle. If you believe that a higher power granted you life for a purpose, do Him / Her the supreme favor of using the marvelous brain you were born with, and be brave enough to live in the bands of gray where most Truth lives.
As quietly powerful religious thinkers Frances Kissling and Richard Mouw gracefully show in a moving episode of Krista Tippett's American Public Media show On Being, it is only when you stop talking long enough to really hear those with different views that you stand a chance of getting past this national shouting match over abortion and women's healthcare.
To me, the greatest human value of all is respecting one another's divine essence enough to actually see the light inside each one of us. Efforts to obscure that truth with one-topic bludgeons, to divide us from one another so we can no longer communicate with civility, is the greatest evil of all.
If you care about reading beyond the headlines, here are a few places to start. I welcome anything you've found that adds to the conversation.

The first place I found the kind of context I was looking for this morning was in this surprising backgrounder from The Daily Kos – the "largest progressive community blog in the U.S":
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/02/01/1060885/-Behind-the-Pink-Curtain-Komens-Political-Agenda

Here's AP's story today, on what Planned Parenthood's role in securing mammograms for women actually is:  

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iF4s0f2Mvo-5uJwdG96YyKTjmhOA?docId=144d4682a1804b2888dfc09816698362

Here's the take from the Weekly Standard, a leading neo-conservative blog founded by William Kristol:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/after-lying-about-providing-mammograms-planned-parenthood-outraged-breast-cancer-charity-cuts-grants_620875.html

When you get dizzy from the volleys, take a quiet minute to consider a more thoughtful conversation about the issues that have divided us so, from Krista Tippett, host of American Public Media's show about  values and ethics called On Being:

http://blog.onbeing.org/post/2891389588/healing-our-fractured-civil-spaces-on-abortion-by

Finally, a related essay from Christian ethicist David P. Gushee on the importance of listening:

http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2011/listening-beyond/essay-gushee.shtml

If you care about women's lives and health, become someone who refuses to play the Divide and Conquer game.

The curious case of the $10 mystery

Bleary-eyed from hours of lilypad-leaping online, I was just about to close the laptop when i noticed a FB post from Narrative Urge, the curious spirit behind the delicious communal riddle known as the $10 art mystery:

♥ A Lost Boy on Ponce waits for rescue now
This rhyme by Frederica is meant to tell you how
Paging Charles McNair! 980 on the door
Find it find it find it please, the Bob-A-Lou on 44 ♥


My heart hopped.
I'd given up hoping one of the coveted envelopes (containing a $10 bill, a note and a snippet of prose from someone else, often an Atlanta writer) might land in my mailbox, since I'm practically invisible anymore compared to my successful writer pals Jessica Handler, Kate Sweeney, Gina Webb and Suzanne Van Atten – all of whom had either been sent a letter or had their work quoted in one.
But if I could figure out the clues ..... I could be part of the game too!
My inner Harriet the Spy purred to life. Hmmm. Ponce and Frederica? The library! It's at 980 Ponce de Leon. Charles McNair's brilliant novel "Land o' Goshen" has a club called the Bob-A-Lou!
Breathless, I threw on a ballcap and glasses and grabbed the keys. I could have walked there and back in 15 minutes but felt the pressure of time – the clues were already 20 minutes old!
Once there, I hurried back to the fiction stacks, scanned the shelves of Mc names for Charles and boom, I cradled his book in my hands. It fell open to Page 44, where a white envelope, folded in half, had been tucked between the pages.
Two words were written neatly in blue marker on the front – "for you" – just over the envelope window where Alexander Hamilton's sharply etched chin peeked through.
I stuffed the fat white square in my pocket and peered around to see if anyone was watching. Maybe Narrative Urge herself was here, waiting to see who solved the riddle?
If she was, I couldn't tell –  so I raced back home to open envelope #77.
It contained the hand-written letter I'd seen quoted before:
"Thank you for opening the envelope. The money is real. This is not an ad campaign or marketing ploy. It's an art project. Please use the hints and find us!" Signed Henri Rechatin, Oct. 5, 1966. A purple marker squiggle set off the lines "a site to see: haiku for you" and "robotic cranes dance in singapore. in taiwan appears tornadoes!"
Little black hearts enclosing tinier magenta ones opened and closed the missive.
My literary snippet – "Right, I'm classically trained. And I draw on that, but also I rebel against it, when I think it's important to tell the story" – turned out to be from an interview with Atlanta music legend Bill Taft, whose mournful horn solos helped lodge Smoke's "Another Reason to Fast" in my car's cassette player for months after it came out in 1995.
I spread the pieces out and studied them, surfed the Web to get up to speed on the unfolding story, took a few pictures.
"Follow your narrative urge!" exhorts the mystery sender in looping blue marker script across the bottom of the envelope.
Which made me wonder if this puzzle wasn't screaming so much to be solved as joined.

The whole delicious adventure made me want to round up as many participants as possible over drinks, line the literary snippets up, end to end – and see what kind of new story we could make from the mystery bits.

Walked around downtown today, marveling at the hotel atriums (hyatt, marriott marquis), chancing upon a fabulous parade (courtesy of the atlanta football classic, this year featuring the lock-tight marching 100 from famu) and wandering up and down much-loved streets from my newspaper days past. was grateful the healey building's light-kissed atrium, as lovely as ever, wasn't all locked up for the weekend.

Muffled shouts in the courtyard drew me to the window. Two guys wrestled a bulky object wrapped in blue mover's quilts and rope. They'd move it a few inches, set it down and reconsider. It took 10 minutes to get whatever it was to the bottom of the stairs. I was tempted to open the door to get a better look, but decided it might be smarter to keep my still-pajama'd self inside my own apartment and let the nice men do their work. That hallway is tight enough if you're just carting up boxes of books. They weren't arguing – their voices were more thoughtful, though I couldn't make out the words. Was the weight of the thing what slowed them down – or just figuring out how to navigate the 8 steps up to the landing and the 8 steps after? And then I remembered: A week earlier, the new neighbors had shown up early one morning. Having driven all night from New York City, they were in a hurry to unload the rental car and turn it in before they'd be charged for another day. Their realtor – who had the only key – was nowhere to be found. So they emptied all they'd crammed into the car onto that corner of the courtyard nearest their entrance. A pile of guitar cases, rolled-up carpets, boxes – and a fat-bellied black case we soon learned held an antique oud – spread across the walkway as if it had fallen from the sky. They'd just been hired by different colleges to teach music, said he – tall, with dark curls and deep laugh lines. He made conversation while she – petite, sun-colored hair – sped off to return the car. Guitar was his specialty; piano was hers. "But we won't make much noise," he said with a laugh, as if to ward off potential complaints. We begged him to reconsider. The moving-in would happen in stages, he said. Last to arrive would be his wife's piano. When it arrived, I was a thin wooden door away from all the excitement. But not, it turned out, without a view. Though I've yet to see the piano without its thick layer of blue quilt, it sounds from here as if it couldn't be happier.