Wal-Mart: Seeing evil for what it is

I start my morning most days by reading everything that has been written in the last 24 hours about Wal-Mart. Needless to say it's often not the most upbeat way to start the day. This week it's been bribery scandals in Mexico, empty shelves here in the States, and of course their lawsuit against UFCW for helping workers to stand up for themselves. The articles change, but the core thread the runs through all of them is that here in our country exists an entity, a multi-billion dollar company that is so vast it has literally saturated the US rural market and additionally become such a huge part of the supply chain that it actually dictates what standards of pay and condititions will be set internationally. That is almost unfathomable power. And to quote Uncle Ben from Spider Man "With great power comes great responsibility."

Here lies the problem. Wal-Mart does not take responsibility, not for it's workers stateside, and certainly not for it's workers internationally. My grandma and I have often argued over the fact that she shops at Wal-Mart. She says as a senior citizen on a medicare budget, she simply cannot afford to shop elsewhere. This makes me sad, partly because Wal-Mart's brand is so strong that my own grandma, a highly educated woman will not do the research to discover that prices are comparable at other stores, but also because in shopping there she has become complicit in maintaining a class of working poor. Wal-Mart markets itself an advocate for the working class...a place where the fiscally challenge can find everyday low prices, but at what costs.

Here are somethings I have learned from my daily Wal-Mart briefings:

• The average wage of a Wal-Mart worker is $8.81 an hour. (compare to Costo which pays $11 starting)
• The majortiy of employees are part time.
• Scheduling is done by favoritsm and is not transparent making it difficult for people to arrange childcare or attend school.
• Wal-Mart has lost of settled lawsuits totalling in the billions from employees who have been discriminated against on the basis of their race and gender. (Side note: Just yesterday I met a man who was a manager a local Wal-Mart for 2 years and was asked to fire a black female employee who has been exemplary in every way, and even sold $200,000 worth of jewelry the week prior. When he refused, he was pulled into an office and berated. The employee he refused to fire was attacked with racist epitaths. They both quit.)
• Wal-Mart has also been sued (and lost) by customers who have been racially profiled...there was a case in one Alabama store where Mexican American customers were being asked to produce docements to prove that they were legal residents before being allowed to shop at Walmart.
• The majority of Wal-Mart employees are not eligible for healthcare due to their part time status and those that are can't afford it due to astronomical premiums.
• Wal-Mart employees make up the greatest population of people draining our social resources within the state of Washington. That's right, they are paid so poorly that they qualify for federal assistance. This is actually a national issue, not just local.
• Workers internationally are paid even less and do not have OSHA regulated working conditions as evidenced in the Tazrene fire that killed 112 Bangladeshi workers whose families have still not received one dime of remuneration...not to mention those who survived.

I could go on at length, but the picture is pretty clear. So now what? We have the David and Goliath battles. There are employees and organizations not affiliated with Wal-Mart who are coming together to try to raise awareness about these issues, but change is hard fought and not easily obtained. Every few days I read something positive about Wal-Mart. They are bringing grocery stores to food deserts, hiring Veterans, buying products from women owned businesses, but I can't erase the rest of it. Because while these things are happening, Wal-Mart has invested more money in frivilous lawsuits and meaningless PR than in listening to it's employees. While Costco and Trader Joes are advocates for a higher minimum wage, Wal-Mart has done everything it can to lobby against it.

And what it all comes to down to for me is compassion. Behind every organization or corporation, no matter how large, are simply people. Wal-Mart was started by one man, Sam Walton, who had a vision of helping people save a dollar. And it is being continued by his family and the board of trustees. So just this once, I want to put aside the adversarial tone and implore that we get beyond greed and defensiveness to the basics of human necesities. We all need food, water, and shelter...and in this wealthy country, we have the capacity to provide this for every single person. Moreover the majority of us aren't asking for these necesities to be free. We are willing and able to work. But another basic right that often goes unstated is respect. The members of OUR Walmart, more than asking for just economic compensation for the work that they do which makes the Waltons their daily billions, are also asking that they be treated like human beings. And the evil I see, the sadness of my morning reading is that they have not been met with compassion. They have not been met with basic humanity. They have been severly mistreated then told that if they don't like it they should just get over it because that is the cost of low prices.

I guess, for me, it's just too expensive to shop at Wal-Mart.

Lessons learned from my magnolia tree

Last week we had that one sunny day. In Seattle this is akin to Jesus coming to visit. There is that kind of buzz. People don't even say hi to you, they say "Oh my God isn't it beautiful," as a greeting. And if you glance around the office, you will notice that you are probably alone or stuck with some pretty miserable people, because everyone else is outside. It's seriously that deep.
And then it went back to that colorless sky, on again off again chilly rain that is our perpetual default. I would be annoyed except, if you've ever been here you know it's not an ordinary gray. Seattle is too beautiful even on a blah day, that perfect alchemy of green with water and mountains and a killer cityscape skyline. I digress.

So it was another one of those gray days when I stepped out onto my back porch juggling all my work crap, trying like hell to make it to the car, when I noticed my Magnolia tree. Just the day before it had been barren. Now suddenly it was decked out with porcelain looking buds, silky white but blush wine colored at the base. It was enough to pull me out of my morning mania. When did that happen? How did I miss it?

One day it was winter and now, my grass is growing again and the blackberry bush is puffing out, threatening to take over my whole back yard. And I wonder about the comparable processes in my life, all the unseen unfelt evolution within me. I want to wake up tomorrow budding, ripe to bloom. I want to wake up with so much beauty within me that it can no longer be contained by any semblance of barreness. Rumi says flowers celebrate by falling apart...I don't want to get that far overjoyed, if anything I am hoping more to fall together, connect all the pieces of what I want, what I love, who I am and what I do to make a perfect blossom of divine right purpose and soul prosperity.

Satisfaction Guaranteed?

I get to this point in my day where all my meetings are finished, my high priority tasks are complete, and there is still work to be done, but it’s nothing that I can’t do tomorrow. That’s when I get into trouble. Idle hands you know…and internet access. But today instead of spending the next two hours killing brain cells on facebook, I’d like to pose the question: Is this all there is?

Seriously. I finished high school, then college, and kicking and screaming even made it through grad school, all with the mantra looping in my head that this was what I needed to do in order to have a successful career. I mean unless you’re Bill Gates or Kanye West, drop-outs tend to have some tough prospects. But here is the thing, maybe there is one thing they got right, both Gates and West made a choice to pursue their passions.

Me, I made the choice to go to school, even after years of re-discovering all the ways in which being a student is not my passion. But it was all worth it right? Just out of grad school I landed a prestigious job with a nice title, an office with a window, and even an assistant. But it was terrible and at the end of two years I transitioned into a less prestigious, but better paying job, which was great, for a while. But then I got bored and I got this nagging voice in my head that said “Is this really why you spent all that time and money on grad school?” So I went on my big vision quest, took 7 months to travel and lounge, meditate, eat good food, visit friends, work on my novel, and really decide what to do.

I came back and landed my “dream job” with better pay, a better title, free trips to Guatemala, and a chance to really be that international education nerd I had studied to be. In some ways it was awesome, in others it was not, and for the longest time I worked hard to really make it work. And it did, until it didn’t. And then once again I walked right into another job. And I like it. I’m learning a lot, I love my co-workers, and I have a lot of opportunities to meet different people. BUT. There is always a but.

Is this what the next 30 years is going to be like? Get up, go to the gym, eat healthy, go to my job, sometimes love it, sometimes be bored out of my mind, live for the weekends, get melancholy on Mondays. Repeat until retirement. Um, I might need some Prozac or a mojito…or a case of mojitos and some chocolate cake. I don’t know what it would take to make me feel better about this. But that’s life right? That’s what everyone says it’s supposed to be.

Still there is a part of me that keeps crying out for more. Not just more money or less time at work, just more…more joy, more excitement, more fulfillment. I want to make a difference and I feel like day by day I do things that resonate. I contribute to my community, but somehow even this isn’t enough. Am I the only one out there with this insatiable need to live a life that isn’t just about struggling to make it to 5:00pm?

Words in my mind

What is the power of my word? If you don't read this will I still write it? If I don't post it, will you still feel it? It was said that the entire Universe was called into being by one word, the word of God made manifest in a bang. If no one heard it, was there still a sound, and what was that first sound like with nothing to compare it to? What would anyone's life be like with nothing to compare it to, no sense of good or bad, right or wrong?

Last night I started a class called The Power of Your Word and it has left me thinking about words...the words I choose to say and the words I never say. I woke up in the middle of the night filled to bursting with words I wanted to say. So much and yet, even in the privacy of my own home I felt censored by my own judgement. I want to say what I mean. I want to mean what I say, but sometimes what I have to say isn't pleasant. It isn't clean and tidy. It isn't easy. Should I still say it?

We talked about affirmations, mantras, using words to sow thoughts into our consciousness like planting seeds of what we will want to say later. There were some beautiful words, deliciously juicy and powerful in their sequence, but as I lay there in the middle of the night, those were not the words that came to me. As I listened to my own mind run and ramble, my inner words betrayed my fears, my sadness, my shadows. Are these unspoken words as powerful as the joy I choose to speak? Sometimes I feel like they are, like even if I only say the "good" things, it won't erase the inside words.

So how do you change your word? Your world is an out picture of what you think, but how do you change your thoughts. Are mantras enough? Memory created through repetition? I'm searching for the magic words.

From Whence We Came Final Project: On Choosing and Choices

“I say, do not choose; but that is a figure of speech by which I would distinguish what is commonly called choice among men, and which is a partial act, the choice of hands, of the eyes, of the appetites, and not a whole act of the man,” Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Plan Be
I say do not choose
for it is chosen.
Do not believe
what is not your highest good.
Don’t walk in shadows
when light is available,
and it is always available
for you to choose,
but do not choose,
let the choice be made for you,
the Universe has your coordinates
pre-programmed into the GPS,
just follow the directions.
It’s okay if you arrive at a dead end.
That is simply an illusion,
turn around and try again,
pay attention this time,
make the better choice
by not choosing to go that way
this time.

I once wrote a reflection paper for a class on Practitioner Inquiry. It was a course all about research and formulating questions and theoretical frameworks. I didn’t understand it at all. That is the synopsis of my paper. In response the Professor wrote across the top of the paper “This is great! I’m glad you are getting comfortable with ambiguity!”

For the record, I am not particularly comfortable with ambiguity. In fact I find ambiguity to be mostly very uncomfortable. I think one of the appealing features about Religious Science is the clarity. I grew up in the Episcopal Church, which was actually a very lovely place to grow up. I liked the smell of the incense, the glow of candles, the way the words from the Book of Common Prayer echoed through the chapel, but there came a time when I outgrew it. I still loved the liturgy and the community, but I had more questions than they had answers and after a while I stopped wanting to go.

Fast forward to about 2006, a friend invited me to CSL. It was a prayer service and one of the first things that struck me was how different their version of prayer was. I grew up thinking of prayer as a kind of letter to the Santa of the sky. It was a one way letter, not a correspondence. And it was good to add in promises as incentive for God…I promise to be a better person if you just make me physically healthy again…that kind of thing, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, but overall the process felt about as powerful as wearing lucky socks to a soccer game.

This prayer was different. This Emma-like passionate demanding of things as though we were entitled to them…well it was very different. And then there was this whole concept of personal responsibility. I was used to the idea of taking your troubles and giving them to Jesus. I don’t know what he was supposed to do with them exactly, but that was standard protocol and then you were free to keep crying rather than try to fix anything yourself. So here I was, not only responsible for my life, but this God presented to me seemed like some cosmic vending machine, and there was Kathianne handing me quarters and saying: You can have what you want. You deserve it. Now choose.

This is where things get complicated. I have to say I never really understood why God would have given us free choice, especially after centuries of humanity proving itself unequal to the task of making good choices. This has been one of my biggest struggles. What kind of life should I choose? Central to this overarching choice is the conundrum of my divine right employment.

“We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choices of his daily craft and profession,” wrote Emerson. As I read this passage, I felt annoyed by the reoccurrence of old ambiguities. So we can choose, but we are pre-disposed to our choices. While this is true…I can tell you I am definitely not pre-disposed to take up any trade requiring math or science, these natural delimitations are only useful informational tidbits, they don’t make the decision for us.

“There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion. He is like a ship in a river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one,” Emerson continued.

Maybe my river is wide and with a swirly multi-directional current. I feel pulls, rip tides and undercurrents that pull me first one way and then another. And the only clarity throughout this process is that I could do these things and make a difference. I can and have been a teacher, a writer, an artist, a box loader, a Program director, a study abroad coordinator, and community organizer. And at times these things have made my heart sing, but I still have no idea what will make it sing consistently. Or more honestly, I don’t know how to combine the pieces to make a sustainable career. Say I do become a novelist and make hella money, will I miss working with kids? Will I miss being an activist? “Has he not a calling in his character?” Emerson asks, to which I respond. YES. Many callings. But do I have to choose?!

I will leave you as Emerson left me, with no perfect conclusion, but instead with some more insight to what I am thinking. The first poem will appear in my next book Love and Guatemala. I wrote it during one of the other classes I took at CSL (can’t remember which one) but it’s pretty applicable to this experience as well and speaks to me relationship with what I should know vs. what my mind recognizes. I wrote the second poem a few days ago as a response to the ugliness that happened during the Oscars, but the more I read it, the more it seems like both a love poem to myself and an instruction manual on how to be myself.

Through my poetry I am attempting to map this river that Emerson is talking about. I’m not sure how great of a cartographer I will prove to be, maybe only time will tell, but this is where I am with it so far.

Consciousness
The irony is in forgetting,
in having these ground breaking moments
and then not remembering what shifted,
only the end results,
only the here and now of what is
and who I am
and everyday even that is erasing itself.
I try to write it down,
take a picture,
but truth isn’t digital,
clarity is un-photographable,
un-reproducible,
just like love is simply
a four letter word
that never really says what I want it to,
because what I mean is so much more.
How I feel is a puzzle of missing pieces
and what I wanted to tell you about me,
what would have made it all come together,
I can’t quite remember.

Yes, the irony is in forgetting.
I sit in meditation
to know what I once knew,
to remember the secrets
God whispered to me
before pushing me through the womb
into this backwards
carnival of illusions.
In my heart of hearts
I am a foreigner in my own world,
blinded by the trappings
of skin and bone,
this time and place,
this incarnation.
But in the stillness,
or in the blur of
colors,
the blare of music
and spinning
and spinning
and too much rum,
when you are standing too close
and I am holding on too tight
and letting go
all at once,
there are higher truths all around me
like a rain of shooting stars
blinding in their brilliance,
perfect in their moment
and gone in a blink.

And I know that it’s all in there
somewhere woven into the spaces between what I think
and what I feel,
the knot of gray matter.
It’s the truth that rests
on the tip of my tongue,
the dream just beyond the reach
of my cognitive abilities.
And sometimes it comes to me.
And sometimes it’s gone
and I’m just trying to remember.

On Being Black And A Butterfly
Even our cocoons must be Kevlar.
No spindly feelers breech the bud,
no filmy wings, slick and paper thin
greet this dawn.
We emerge fully present to our
enduring capacity to remain unbroken.
Our wings are boned in titanium
framed with panes of
shatterproof stained glass.
No wild summer breeze,
nor gale force hurricane
will set us to flit and flutter.
Us with wings of leaden gold,
us with wings like eternity
improbably heavy,
must create our own currents,
raise ourselves sturdy and skyward
to take flight by surprise.

We must fall in love
with our own industrial beauty,
never expect to be recognized
for the glorious celestial beings we are,
learn to swat daggers with every wing flap,
learn to embrace wholeness
the way Vampires learn to love
the curse of immortality,
those cuts will never kill us,
might sting, might bleed,
but we will remain unbroken.
We must learn to love and
understand the gift of our
impenetrable vulnerability.
We must learn to be held
and to hold others,
but know it is only
in the cradle of our own arms
that freedom is really free,
only in the understanding and sweet embrace
of our own souls
that love is fully expressed.

It is up to us to be:
Be the butterfly,
Be you, be me.
Be the night sky,
Be the stars,
Be the Universe,
Be the traveler unafraid of new adventures
Be the road that wraps back around on itself,
Be the song sung by a child when no one is awake to hear her,
Be the humming wings of quick moving birds,
Be the steady pulse of the mountain,
Be the river arching out to ride the wind across the desert sands,
Be the rain that makes love to each grain of rice in the fields,
Be whatever and whoever we dare to be,
Be the fulfillment of a universal promise,
Be the butterfly,
Be the little black girl arms and smile outstretched with no fear of poison daggers,
Be the little black girl with nothing to lose and the whole world on a yo-yo string already in her back pocket,
Be the Kevlar butterfly, bulletproof and daggerproof and wordproof and poisonproof.
Be the proof that black girls can fly.

The Ghosts of Boyfriends Past: Getting The Lesson Already

Sometimes I am a little slow, not always, not often, but sometimes it takes me a while to learn the thing that is probably obvious to everyone else. Okay, so for those of you who might be in the middle of learning this lesson. Please take a moment to live vicariously through me...I mean why should we both have to suffer?

For the last two years I have been beseiged with the Ghosts of Boyfriends Past. That's right, I don't get dead white guys in chains, I get that phone call from the soldier I haven't seen in 8 years or the business owner turned cab driver I hadn't seen in 3 years. I look up from my treadmill and there is that dude who ditched out on going to the Me'Shell NdegeOcello concert with me (so indisputably his loss) or I round the corner and there is that thick Haitian-again.

*Side note: I once went back in reverse chronological order and wrote a haiku summation of every boy I've ever dated or not exactly dated. Trust: it's the best set of haikus you will never read.*

I digress, so after a few of these incidents which I admittedly did not always handle with the grace of a cool head, I realized that this was going to be some kind of theme. So I began to be prepared. I stopped flinching so visibly, even managed to exchange pleasantries. Maybe this was the Universe telling me to grow up or something. And then I got it in my head that it was the Universe giving me a second chance. This may be a spoiler, but let me just save you the suspense... that is not what the Universe was trying to tell me. I speak English. I am fluent in Spanish. I can get by in Japanese and even know a few words in French, Thai, and Portugese, but somehow I never know what they hell the Universe is talking about. Hate to be Republican about it, but really Universe SPEAK ENGLISH already.

As a result of my brilliant misinterpretation I actually found myself on some dejavou dates. I mean not every guy I've dated is a total douche bag...there were some quality candidates in that rejected pile. And that was in part a nice discovery, that I actually liked and had something to talk about with a few exes. I might have even salvaged a friendship or two from the Ex rubble (going against my solid rule of date and ditch foever), but as for romance. Nope. Not even. Time is not a cure all. Mostly what I discovered is that the reasons we didn't work were mostly still the reasons we didn't work.

So as for the lesson, got it. Trust your first instinct. If you aren't attracted to someone, if they aren't emotionally available, if you're not sure if you can trust him...you are right. So that was it right Universe? I got it, so you can stop sending them back my way. I am ready for new mistakes.