Saturday, November 21, 2009
The question
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Deconstructing Womyn and A Way
Thusly, it is exhausting being this thing called womyn...and expensive (ah, capitalism). However, it is only such, if we allow it. I have said NO to this hegemonic structure. I have been slowly saying NO for 10 years. It took me awhile. I grew up in a fishbowl existence where my self-centered fear of people watching me, was not entirely inaccurate. It happened-the Preying-over and over again. The power was taken from me at a young age.
Our young women are not being fully nurtured and held closely to our hearts. What is happening? When are we going to learn? One out of every six women have been victims of an attempted or completed rape at some point in their life. 9 out of 10 rape victims are female. Every 2 seconds someone is sexually assaulted and 44% of sexual assault and rape victims are under the age of 18 (see www.rainn.org). Our girls are hurting. We need to protect our girls. We need to give them permission to live full bright lives, whatever shape that takes. We need to give them permission to be human and embrace their size, shape, and color. This is so paramount to our future. We do not live in a vacuum. We are interconnected, all of us, every single thing on this planet.
This has been made abundantly clear to me in the last few months, shockingly so. It is so stunning, this stark reality, that sometimes all I can do is break down and weep for all the daughters and sons, the parents, the sisters, the brothers, all of us. But I don't weep from a place of fatigue and bitterness. I weep because I realize we are hurting, we are suffering. This planet, this life hurts. There is pain that I have experienced and there is pain I will never even know about. But, when one follows the path all the way down, digging deep into the core of all that is-tracking the path from violence into the stillness of nonviolence-one becomes a conduit of wholly integrated compassion. And it is there where the beauty lies. It is there where the hope resides. It is there where the freedom resides. Freedom from anger, fear, desperation, isolation. Because within the still small place is a haven called sacred interconnectedness. This is the liberation. This is Freedom.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Mainlining
Sometimes I wonder how I believe in nonviolence. Lately, there is a loneliness creeping its way, like a shadowy figure following me in the cool back alley fog. This loneliness is trying to separate me from everything. From belief in basic fundamental goodness in others and myself. It is tailing me questioning me through people, in conversation, in the most innocuous places. The challenges within the rhetoric are strong and almost lethal. Statements are made that only inhabit the ultimate realm of the realist. Sad, sad, sad statements of the unknown soldier left alone on the battlefield to die. What are these utterances? They are the giving up. They are the pernicious coma. They are the apathetic malaise.
Do I internalize these struggles? Why yes, of course. Because for me, that is the integral part of the struggle. It is my own conflict, my own battle. The “others” I have fought for so long have gone and I am left with me and me. It was easier before…when I could use anger and hurt to blame others. I could remain in my own place of victimization and perpetrate on myself.
And then the freedom came.
Or at least I accepted it…what was always there.
And now the responsibility of living a life dedicated to peace through nonviolence is everything to me. I know nothing else.
I am raw and ready.
Hungry and Bloated.
Exhausted and Alive.
I am not the same since Israel/Palestine. There are moments where I feel like I have mainlined into the main artery of all the suffering on this earth. Laying me out for hours, I wonder what is happening to me? Upon recovery, I am neither embittered nor contemptuous. I feel a robust, swelling of compassion rise and visualize the mighty chest of a baboon making way for the still beating heart.
Let us all allow our hearts to emerge and grow so gigantically that our bodies need to adjust with them. Let us be so willing to grow in love that we will be difficult to recognize in six months. Let us love and live with each other in a way only the innocence of a child knows. Let us love, love, love and remember there is no other, there is only yourself. Be still and know that God is in the midst of you.
I used to wonder how anyone could believe in nonviolence. Now, I wonder how anyone could not. This is not about waking in dreaming, this is about our lives, our children’s lives, and their children’s lives. Our world is depending on us.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
The Journey within the Journey
Peace, Salaam, Shalom! I am back in the East Bay for about a month now after spending some days in the New York area after my return from Israel/Palestine. For a quick refresher, I was with CODEPINK on a 40 person international delegation, attempting to deliver toys, school supplies, etc. to the children of Gaza. We set up camp near the border (about 30 minutes from the Erez crossing) at a fabulous ecological, totally sustainable farm called Adamama. Due to my own fear of bringing a computer, having been warned of possible confiscation upon arrival at the Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, I decided to leave the laptop at home. Hence, the subsequent lack of blogging. However, when I did return to the states, I was so full of feeling that I found I could not write…or maybe I was just resisting it, I am not sure. The following entry is most likely going to be a journey within the journey.
These last four weeks of my life have been the happiest of my life and at once, have yielded some of the most provocative feelings and emotions I have felt. It is truly something to feel as though you are no longer participating in the dress rehearsal of life, but are instead part of something so much bigger than you, something you have wanted to participate in for a long time. The gratitude in that is immense, yet there is another component. Within this joy and this happiness of serving on a delegation so important and so necessary, is the very real sadness and heartbreak of the witness itself.
I wish I could write that it was not heartbreaking to stand in the starkness of the Erez Crossing, every day continuously attempting to deliver toys to the children of Gaza at the border, and repeatedly denied by the Israeli government. I wish I could write that my heart did not tear in helplessness as I stared at the fence with the sun broiling down, wondering how close the Gazans actually were, knowing we were not going to be allowed entry. I wish I could write that I sat without tears in my eyes, rolling down my face, when Elise Aghazarian-a young Palestinian woman who has always lived under the occupation- shared her dream to one day see Jaffa and the Mediterranean Sea. I wish I could write that I understand a world where walls and fences and gates need to be constructed around us for things to be "safe." But I can’t write this and I will never believe this. And for this I am thankful, because I know there is another way, a solution.
I can write about the power of nonviolence. I can write that even after witnessing the absolute despair of a seemingly hopeless situation, I am more hopeful than I have ever been. I can write that I had the great fortune of working with some of the most amazing activists, ranging in age from 20 to 70, and with varying levels of experience and backgrounds-from students to people like co-founder of CODEPINK Medea Benjamin and humanitarian clown Patch Adams. I can write that we made those Israeli guards at the crossing break down and laugh and smile with all the love we bestowed upon them, through our clowning around, donning big red clown noses. I can write that the people of Gaza knew we flew our kites in solidarity with them on the other side of the fence, the fence that separates them from us. We flew them high in the sky so that maybe, just maybe they would see them and know they were not alone. I can write that we wrote messages for the people of Gaza and tied them to the fence with flowers, while the guards looked on in disbelief, not knowing what to do. I can write that we danced and sang and laughed together at the border, building a playground, while the samba band played. I can write that we did not give up and we must still not give up.
Now, please do not misunderstand me, it was difficult. After all, in the end, they did not let us into Gaza. The items we brought, including the playground we hoped to bring to the children, were not allowed entry. Such items like pumpkins, sugar, concrete, paper, tea, chocolate, flour, coffee, etc. are all considered contraband and can be allowed/disallowed at the discretion of Israeli government. We had a strong sense we would not be allowed in, but that was not the point. The point was to try our hardest and moreover, expose the absurdity of the situation, all the while using nonviolence. The media picked up on our presence there and through our Ahava boycott protest (see link below), we gained attention from Israeli news.
Before I left I wondered exactly why I was going. I felt compelled to go, to witness, but was not completely sure why. Very early on in the journey it became clear. It was simple: it was what I was supposed to be doing and where I was supposed to be. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been "alive" for so long it seems as though the majority of the world has accepted it to always be this way. I am too stubborn to roll over and relinquish to this ideology, the idea of "this is how it is." I choose to subscribe to how things ought to be. I remember when the Berlin Wall came down and my mother told me to remember the moment, expressing I was witnessing history. I remember South Africa and apartheid and the boycotts of the 80s. I remember the photograph of the student in Tiananmen Square: this courageous act of nonviolence, a young man alone in front of a line of tanks-this changed my life. As I type out this cathartic entry, I steal glances of my poster revealing the unknown Tiananmen Square hero and remember Gandhi’s words, "When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it-always." Yes, thank you God, I still believe in nonviolence and know the potentiality for transformation is always possible.
Peace and all good,
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3727445,00.html
http://www.youtube.com/user/CWPAction
http://news.walla.co.il/?w=/1/1499704
www.flickr.com/groups/codepinkisraelgazadelegation/pool
http://www.bilin-ffj.org/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ann-wright/israeli-police-and-milita_b_215…
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/06/20096141740489764.html
p.s. more about the delegation next time…stay tuned…
The Infancy Stage
Greetings from Tel Aviv and peace and all good! After nearly 20 hours of travel, various security checkpoints, and some interesting vegetarian combination meals provided by the airline, I touched down at the Ben Gurion airport.
Upon arrival, through the speakers of the 777 airplane, drifted the melody of Louis Armstrong’s "What a Wonderful World." ‘And I thought to myself,’ what an amazing life this is and what phenomenal juxtapositions therein. Here I am, thrilled to be able and willing to participate in this delegation with CodePINK and yet simultaneously, feeling conflict within my own self. Let me go back a moment and explain.
From the flight from Newark to Tel Aviv I was fully immersed in what felt, looked, and sounded, like Israel. It was incredible. I watched the Hasidic Jews performing morning prayers in the back of the plane and reading the Torah by overhead light, while the plane was dim and quiet in sleep. I watched the young people laugh and cajole in excitement as we approached our destination. And I watched the children sleep in little baby bins with Hebrew prayers protectively crowning them.
I began to feel like an impostor, like I was doing something wrong. After all, can I not tell anyone my purpose for going to Israel? How would my new friend to my left receive it if I said I believed the siege, the occupation, of Gaza should end?
Then, I began to deconstruct my beliefs in nonviolence. Remembering that there is no other. There is only love. I sat in my seat, in the wee small hours, feeling the prayers being quietly spoken surround me, remembering the Gandhi quote-the ways of truth and love always win out. However, if I said these sentiments to any of my Israeli companions or potential Palestinians acquaintances, what would they say? Would they believe that there is no ‘other’? Would they be able to breath in the potentiality of transformation that nonviolence brings? Maybe not all, but I know some do.
We, the CodePINK Israel/Gaza team, will be meeting this evening June 5th with Coalition Women for Peace-an Israeli organization devoted to healing this terrible conflict. There is tremendous hope in that. There is tremendous hope in the fact that there are current and past delegations that have been going into Gaza, delivering humanitarian aid. There is tremendous hope that there are organizations all over the U.S. and the world devoted to peacemaking and peacekeeping. Personally, there is tremendous hope that so many of my dear friends and family supported me so I could join this delegation. People do care about what is happening in the world.
And it is in this hope I remember I am not an impostor doing something wrong, for simply taking a stand. A stand against injustice. I think of the two handed nonviolence philosophy learned from Pace e Bene workshops. The philosophy of extending one hand outwards and the other up in guarded blessing. This makes sense to me and I can sit in this truth.
This is what I will bring with me today upon entering the infancy stage of the delegation, or maybe it is my own infancy stage.
It is also what I will remember upon touring this area. Last night I walked to the beach and stared out at the Mediterranean Sea, looking at a deep expanse of beauty rich in color. The setting sun cast shadows on the sand and nearby cafes. Looking closer I saw three young people, in military uniform, walking along the beach path. To my right, I saw a type of mall with various eateries inside and a uniformed man waving a security baton over incoming patrons. Walking back to the hostel from the beach, a young military man passed by, gun strung across his back, and I thought back to Louis’ song and the juxtapositions therein. The sun set and the moon shone its nearly full beautiful face.
May Peace Continue to Guide Us~Peace, Salaam, Shalom, Pace, Pax, and all the others of course~
Preparation, inner struggles, and other side notes
Greetings Pace e Bene family and other friends! I am embarking on a journey with CodePINK today, a journey supporting the healing of all those suffering from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The delegation begins June 5th in Tel Aviv and about 30 of us will be working alongside the Israeli organization Coalition of Women for Peace. Our goal is to attempt to deliver toys, school supplies, and other aid to the children of Gaza. However, if we are not granted entry, we do have an alternate itinerary which includes everything from workshops with the humanitarian clown Patch Adams to touring East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Needless to say I have been running around for the last several days in preparation for this adventure and witness. Trying to stay grounded and immersed in the principles of nonviolence, I have asked myself the question "why am I doing this?" many times. And many answers have followed. For one, because it is important and necessary. The people of Gaza are hurting and suffering. But, in my inner work I always remember that the perceived "other" in this conflict is also wounded. This is where I remember my truth and that is, if I truly believe in nonviolence, truly believe in its transformative quality/power, then there is no other-there is only love. I also have heard the response "Because it is time." I am not sure what this means quite yet. I know I have waited a long time to take part in nonviolent service at this level. And having said that, I know that for a very long time I was not ready to participate in such activity.
I am not sure that I am fully prepared now…could one ever be? But, I am sure that I am honored to be a part of such a delegation and hope to bring love and compassion to the people I meet along the way. I hope to remember the ways of truth and love. I hope to check my fear at the San Francisco Airport and forgive myself for where I forget. I hope to sit in humility and levity. I hope to carry my true heart and I hope to remember to laugh and sing and smile. I hope…:)
The excitement is bearing down now and I leave in just a few moments. I can feel the prayers around me and it is good. May Peace Continue to Guide Our Every Step.
See you next in Tel Aviv!
Pace e Bene,
Felicia