I bought my ticket yesterday. It’s that kind of trip. I’ll be gone for a week, and probably won’t have time to write while I’m there.

There is much to say, though. I’ve got a heap of questions to unravel and feelings to express about all of this, but they’ll have to wait.

Gotta say I feel shamed. I know that this site is my little idea and emotion playground and I can do whatever I want, but I feel like if I want to really push my thinking and writing further, I’ve gotta be reading more. I’ve gotta be dialoguing more with other people’s thinking. Engaging more in community with my writing.

That’s gonna be hard with all of my anxieties about intellectualism, and I imagine that I can really hit some blocks here. But it’s about trying, about putting in the practice. So that’s what I’m gonna do. I probably want to start locally, with some friends’ blogs, and with Gathering Forces…but I’m also interested in writing about something the New York Study Group put out about revolutionary approaches to reform.

I’ll keep writing my own thinking and life, but I want to be engaging more with other people’s ideas here. It’s the next step for me, I can feel it.

A year from now, I have no idea what I’m going to be doing. I have no idea where Glendi and I will be living. I have no idea what career or education path I might be on. That feels weird and scary, to say the least.

See, my three year commitment at SYPP, the organization where I work, is coming up in December. Glendi and I’s plan for a long while had been that in March of 2011, we’d move to Guatemala for 6 months, to have some solid time with her family in her home context, and to begin a long-range project of building a solidarity school there. For Glendi and I, it’s been a dream. But with the long train of challenges and emergencies that we and her family have faced over the last three years (deportations, evictions, diabetes, accidents, legal struggles, green cards, housemate nightmares), we have now officially exhausted all of our savings, and the dream seems like it needs to be delayed. [here is where you can watch the first 15 minutes of the Pixar movie "UP" to get a sense of how it feels sometimes]

So in the place of that grand plan, there is just kind of a void for me. Do I want to go back to school? If so, for what? Do I want to try my hand at being a teacher? PhD program? Try writing a book? Get another non-profit job? Learn a trade? Truthfully, the options seem wide open for me. While there is a very real pressure to choose a path that will allow us to support our whole family and grow our own close family, within that there are a lot of choices for us to make.

One of the reasons why I chose to start blogging again was just this reality. I need to connect with myself much more consistently and honestly if I hope to see where I personally want to go from here. Glendi and I didn’t ask for the class and imperialist realities in which our relationship and our families exist. That’s what has come with our love. And if we don’t want to fall into the twin traps of selling out and resenting our lives, then it’s important to do some earnest grappling with my own hopes and aspirations for the coming years.

However, right now, at 11:15pm on a Sunday night, I don’t know how much grappling I’m gonna be doing. Maybe it’s enough to just lay the question out here right now, for me to explore with more detail over the next weeks. Because there are so many questions that are wrapped up in this.

One thing I can say for sure, though, and a good foundation for all the exploring to come: I am in love and I am in love with life. And as sad, confused, and scared as I am about the future, I still feel like this life of mine is an adventure. It is a joy in so, so many ways, and I’m genuinely curious about what is to come.

It’s really unacceptable, though, how all of the main characters of color keep getting written out or they just disappear, at a rate of one a season…to the point now that in the third season it’s looking like an all-white cast. What’s up with that? Not to mention that two of the major storylines in the second season had to do with racism, but one of those storylines just…poof…disappeared, while the other one ended up sending the lesson that if a person of color defends themself or their family from racism, they get crushed. No thanks, NBC.

But I also think that I’m beginning to understand the personal appeal of this show for me, as strange as it is to realize: positive masculinity. There is something in some of the main characters, especially the character Coach Taylor, that is like viscerally hitting at my dad issues. Just watching that Coach Taylor character (who’s very well acted, by the way), and the way he makes decisions and yells and is all masculine, but also caring and ethical and emotionally present, it’s like hypnotic to me. It’s weird. This is something that my old therapist had brought up a number of times, my search for models of masculinity that make me okay with who I am and also let me stand up for myself. I don’t really have more to say about it, but it’s almost a scary level of realization to see that that is why I’m watching this silly TV show…what is this unearthing for me?

It’s just plain neat how the way we spend our time–our daily practices, as somatics folks like to talk about it–can totally affect our consciousness and our mood.

Like I said recently, I spent almost the entire weekend in bed, watching TV and playing video games. Essentially, I spent the weekend numbed out. When difficult ideas surfaced in my mind, or stresses began to appear, I would just dive further, surfing the web on my laptop while I watched TV. Playing cellphone games while listening to podcasts. Total sensory overload as a way to shut out feelings as well as the physical pain of my sprained foot and burned finger (small cooking accident).

Very well, but something interesting happened when I chose to turn off Friday Night Lights and try my hand at blogging again. That decision woke me up. It woke my feelings and intellect up! Not only was I reflecting on the US Social Forum, but my mind just started working through all sorts of discourses, project ideas, potential blog posts…including this one. I can’t really emphasize how different I felt. I almost felt like a different person entirely…myself. Exhilarating.

But you open up the flood, and it really comes flooding. I woke up this morning and the first thing I did was turn on some music. Tracy Chapman, singing my soul. The tears came quickly. That when I let myself think and feel, I’ve gotta think about the choices I’ve made, the pressures I feel, a grown man dying in Guatemala and growing Guatemalan young people depressed at the structural walls overshadowing them. The father I may become soon enough, and how I don’t want to be the fathers I’ve seen. How lost I feel when I think about life post-SYPP. Things I’ve mostly written about here before. What mistakes have I made? How badly have I strayed from the path I wanted? How wrong was I about what this life would hold for me?

But also, the flood of the beautiful, the wonderful: how fascinating it is the level that babies’ brains have to work to learn language, and how dazzling it is all the new ideas and poetry that linguistic structures allow; how stunning it is to watch people in my life learn, grow, change…watching younger cousins and ex-students and my own family members…ooh what a privilege it is to participate in; and how utterly overwhelming, how dwarfed I feel by that long train of people before me who have chosen to keep believing in the struggle for the beautiful and fair. I was just so, so happy to feel bathed in this, to feel the wonder of this little world of ours.

You know, maybe this is Bipolar Disorder (if that’s even real)…biochemical cycles going from the numbness and depression to the frantic and awed. But I don’t think so. I think I did make a choice last night to think and feel and reflect…and I think this happiness is really just me connecting to myself again, like coming back to an old friend. And that connection had me dancing alone in my bedroom with a sprained ankle this morning, holding my laptop like a guitar and belting out Christian pop tunes…with feeling.

That was pretty great.

I played a whole lot of video games (Tales of Monkey Island and Monster Hunter for the win), and then I started streaming this TV show that my friend Bruin had mentioned, Friday Night Lights. An NBC series about a high school football team in a small, depressed West Texas town? Not for me, I thought. Well, I bought in as soon as the pilot, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I watched all 22 hours of the first season in a day and a half. I was in bed watching the show for 15 HOURS on Saturday. In fact, before I started writing in this blog tonight I was just finishing the 4th episode of the second season!

So what do I like about it? Do I have a political reason? Not really. I just think the stories are good. It’s pretty much about the whole town and people’s lives, not just football. Now, there are layers of politics to explore and the show does explore them–there’s lot’s of stuff about ablism, some about race and class, a little bit about gender so far. But honestly, I don’t think much of it is all that deep (except for the ablism storylines, which I think are compelling and pretty rare for mainstream entertainment), but it’s gripping for me. I wouldn’t actually recommend it to you, necessarily, but it was gripping for me.

One thing that I particularly was struck by, oddly, was the way people set boundaries in the show. There is a whole lot of “get out” “leave and never come back,” “do the right thing or face the consequences,” kind of talk in the show, and it’s sort of the dominant way people make tough choices in the program. A lot of sort of razor-sharp decisiveness, whether it’s about monogamy or reconciliation, or quitting drinking, or confronting injustice. This didn’t strike me as realistic at all, because I’m very indecisive and I’m terrible at setting boundaries…but I think what is intoxicating about the show is watching people make tough choices and growing by leaps and bounds in each hour long episode…and here I am struggling for years just to even maintain an internal dialogue with myself through mediums like this blog! I think I was drawn to the escape into this world where tough situations are so clear and easy to confront and take action on. If only it were so.

It’s almost midnight now on Sunday night, and I have to get up at 6am to go to work and work on a grant with a deadline…but I’m mighty tempted to put on one more episode to fall asleep to.

Why should anyone but me care about my addiction to this silly show? I have no idea, but I think there are more profound things at work here, relating to how I’m feeling about real life in general. Which hopefully I’ll get to soonish.

-The trip was exhausting! Because I went in my co-director role at Seattle Young People’s Project, serving as an adult chaperone for 9 young people (ages 12-19), I felt like I was constantly checking in with youth, texting someone or another, helping people find workshops, staying up until 2 or 3 in the morning debriefing the experience with the other adult support people. It felt more like work than any kind of trip. However, the good side of this was that I loved it! I really treasured the opportunity I had to really think about supporting teenage activists as they were having this one-of-a-kind experience. It was special to think about their experiences, to listen to their questions, to hear their frustrations, and to reflect back what I was observing from them. It felt like popular education as it was originally theorized: a process of dialogue and reflection where themes are presented, contradictions are unearthed, and new learning unfolds as that new experience clashes with the worldview that the student brings to the table. Though I can’t say that I slept well each night, I did go to sleep very, very happy. I felt really alive.

-Speaking of youths’ frustrations, the USSF has a lot to learn about being youth friendly. Youth were continuously frustrated by the inaccessibility of workshops, intimidation about asking questions (even being laughed at when asking someone to break down the meaning of neoliberalism), the lack of attention to all-ages party spaces throughout the week, and the sorry state of the designated “youth space” which youth said was relegated to a smelly basement (though I never saw it). I’ve heard similar but unique critiques about the ablism of the forum, as well as numerous instances of transphobia (particularly around the issue of gender-neutral bathrooms) but I don’t feel like I know enough to go into detail about it. Google it and I bet you’ll find some brilliant pieces of reflection.

-This was my 3rd time in Detroit, and ironically it was the time that I felt most disconnected from the realities of the city. I spent almost all my time in a very heavily-policed and well-developed area of downtown, and the sheer number of activist folks everywhere gave downtown Detroit a very surreal atmosphere. Many people expressed frustration about this, and made comments about how people should have left downtown to talk with “real Detroiters” and I hear that…but at the same time I was annoyed by how often this came from other white folks, who I felt were kind of falling into some exotification of local folks. As I’ve described it to my friends, it felt almost like some kind of racist petting zoo, with radical white folks talking about walking up and hugging random black people all over town, and asking people for their life stories because they are “so much more interesting than what’s happening in workshops.” I wondered how many of these folks would do the same thing back in their home towns, with the folks of color there? Because of the heavily policed and fair-like atmosphere, it just felt off, the level of entitlement to people’s stories and struggles that I saw people displaying. But maybe that’s just me.

-But speaking of Detroit, the plenary event on the first night of the forum was fantastic! A panel of some Detroit movement elders (including one of my long-time revolutionary stars, Grace Lee Boggs) talking about the history of Detroit as “a movement city” was really powerful. Listening to the discussion of the Detroit uprising of ’67 (I believe), and of movement history before and since, I fluttered my eyes and told my comrades from Common Action that I was in heaven. And I was. I love hearing people talk about their revolutionary experiences, especially when they are older and they still identify as movement people.

-This really hits at something that I’ve been learning about myself generally. I’ve got a big, sappy place in my heart for themes related to aging. I think and write about my own aging a lot (and I will continue to do so, I imagine). The movies that most often make me cry are crap like “The Notebook” or damned “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” not because they are that good, but because they show old people reflecting, making legacies together, and dying. So, watching old radicals reflecting on their contributions to not only a general revolutionary movement, but to the movement in a specific geographic location…it was almost too much. I started crying a bit right in the plenary. It brings up such vivid imaginings of who I want to be at 80 or 90, if I make it…of how I want to contribute and listen and share with my younger comrades in whatever city I end up being committed to.

-As for the workshops, well I spent a lot of time helping young people go to their workshops, and so I missed a number of slots, but almost every workshop I went to was excellent: meeting youth organizers from Mississippi talking about leadership transitions; watching anarchists and other radical scholars talk about movement-based research; a mind-opening workshop about building a leadership pipeline for youth to transition into the social justice movement, as an alternative to the school-to-prison pipeline; a workshop on transformative organizing that integrates whole-body, somatic approaches to personal change to great, structural movement-building thinking; a workshop with some really interesting new-school Marxist type folks about revolutionary approaches to reform; a workshop on US Solidarity with ALBA and the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela; an assembly on a youth-led national student bill of rights campaign…and more. All of these workshops, every single one, was engaging and exciting to me, and I was left with dozens of questions each time.

-This was one of the best parts of my experience (alongside my reflections on youth support): how intellectually electrified the whole thing made me feel. To be honest, as my infrequent blog posts should show, I’ve been in a real political rut. Very busy with work and organizing, but not really inspired or motivated. Just plain down, to be real honest. And one of the consequences of that is that I don’t actually read very much or engage much with current movement discourses. I read maybe seven or eight books a year, that’s all! For me, that’s really sad. But the interesting thing is that at the forum, I was amazed by how fluid and sharp I was in all of the discussions. Even in more tough-vocabulary Marxist discussions I was so happy to so quickly follow all of the exchanges, but also to quickly think about it, process it, and have handfuls of questions at all times. I was just brimming with questions! It was great!

-Many of those questions are potential topics for future blog posts: questions about the relationship between reform that engages the State and the building of revolutionary alternatives; questions of the efficacy of transformative justice organizing within our movements; the role of parties and cadre organizations in building the US left; the role of the city and citizenship as primary revolutionary sites of struggle; the question of community, spirituality, and the search for a political home…and oh so much more!

-But a big highlight for my trip was the personal connections I made in Detroit…almost entirely with people who I already knew: an absolutely heart overflowing hour+ with my brilliant old friend Chris Dixon (thanks, Chris!), a euphoric discussion until 4am with 3 comrades from Common Action about class struggle, transformative justice, and the church model of organizing; late-night debriefs and confessions about race, age, identity and vulnerability with my fellow adult support people…I just felt so connected with these people who I’m organizing with and who I have known for awhile.

-In short, for my organization the USSF was a solid experience that will pay off for our organizing. For me personally, it was even better: a vital refresher that came at a perfect time, a time when I’ve been doubting more and more who I am in relation to movement work. It was a great reminder of just how comfortable I am thinking about revolution, social movements, strategy, theory, and down-to-earth questions of change. It’s like since I was 14 my mind has become finely tuned to this stuff (which is pretty much the case), and I had really missed it. So it was great to feel it again.

There, now I wrote that, all in a half-hour. Here’s hoping this quick post keeps me writing here again.

Basically, I’m talking about ideas that relate to being a better organizer, building a better revolutionary movement in the U.S., balancing life and activism, and meaningful popular education. At the core of these ideas, there are a couple of key words that I’ve been playing around with for a long time: mutual inspiration, personal cycles, and presence. These are words that just keep coming up for me over and over in my life and my work, and there is something there that I want to unlock. There is new theory there. There is really strong organizing potential. But how to get at it?

The answer to this question, I think, lies in the concept of presence itself. It is a tremendous challenge to both hold long-term revolutionary vision for our world, and to be daily present within that world. Even more, it is so, so difficult to see the needs we have for the people around us, and their potential, but to be present with the people they are right now–especially with their own personal dramas–and to really work with them from there. Never mind the constant struggle to be present with our own pain, loss, and senses of inadequacy when we feel like we should be so much more. And in my own case, it’s really hard for me to present with myself for long enough to really develop these ideas that I want to contribute to the world.

And so I return to this blog, specifically as a reminder that there is a space where I can be present with myself; where I can give myself that careful mix of patience, challenge, and attention that make the concept of presence so powerful to me.

In my daily life, things have gone back to feeling so heavy, with the burden of a non-profit and its legacy on my back, with intense internal activist dramas burning around me, and with what seems like less and less time to both take care of myself and meet people’s expectations of me. With that heaviness, it’s even more important to assert what I think is most important for myself, and what I want to be contributing with the youth, the resources, the experience, and the time that I currently have. Because as I get older and as I say yes to more and more of other people’s requests of me, I feel the danger of losing myself and why I became an organizer in the first place.

So, with that said, I’ve cleared some space again to give this another try. To work on articulating these ideas that I think are so important…not only to the social movements around me, but to myself as I’m grasping for meaning and for air.

Now I’ve just returned from my 8th trip to Guatemala, and on the plane home alone, I was just weeping, weeping. I was so moved by how much I love that country, its people, its history, and especially the family that has welcomed me in there. Guatemala has changed me in so many ways, I feel like it’s a critical piece of understanding who I am and what I value these days. How could it be otherwise, with Glendi in my life??

But as I’ve eluded to in previous posts, I don’t really talk about it much anymore. I think that as the ties with Guatemala have grown stronger, and as I become more humbled by how much I don’t know or understand, it becomes harder for me to share. It’s not just the class and race complexities that make it hard to talk about, it’s the whole web of it. Just how different the whole picture is from the realities of my life and my friends’ lives in the U.S.

But I want to keep trying. This blog first started as a way for me to talk about Guatemala and my growth as I spent my first six weeks there. Now that I’ve been there 8 times, there are so many deep reflections that I could be doing here, and I want to give myself the freedom to do that.

But for now, let’s just settle for a quick few fun highlights from my trip:

-Riding for 7 hours in the back of a pickup truck on the way from the capital to Glendi’s family’s house. I love the wind, the sickening sweet smell of burning sugar cane, the disgusting, shit smell of the rubber factories, and the way my legs always completely fall asleep. It’s precisely the length of the journey, so many unknown locations and people that we pass, that really affects me…makes me feel so small in the world.

-Setting up two makeshift basketball hoops outside the family’s house, and playing almost daily 2-on-2 and 3-on-3 tournaments with nearly everyone in the family and extended family, from the 6 year old twins to the 35 year-old Inés. Since I’m a giant compared to everyone else, I get to play Shaq style, just totally guarding and blocking everything…that is until they got really good at passing underneath my legs!

-Picking coffee with Glendi’s dad and brothers on our little plot of land…my first time learning how they pick coffee. It was fun, and the social nature of it reminded me of our old family fishing trips in Alaska. I’m glad that even though the family is very conscious of the exploitation they face when they pick coffee at the fincas…that the actual activity is enjoyable for them. For me, even spending one day doing it, I appreciate just how hard they all work under the sun, and with all the bugs, every day of the week. Glendi’s dad also tried to teach me how to cut brush with a machete…but…that’s going to take me a lot longer to learn! Wow!

-Seeing all of the URNG (the old guerrilla army turned leftist party) graffiti on every single road sign in the area. It gave me hope about increased leftist mobilization since my previous visits, and reminded me that next time I want to plan more than just family time…I want to really seek out and spend time with some more organized Guatemalan leftists. However, I also cynically thought that the graffiti could just be one night’s work of just a small group of youth…who would still be great to connect with!

-Reading 5 books and writing all sorts of stuff in my journal, really re-connecting with some of my favorite political ideas….which hopefully I’ll be writing about more. The peaceful thinking time I had, mixed with the playful family time, really allowed me to get grounded with a lot of the emotional and political stresses that I’m feeling in Seattle these days

-Swimming, swimming, swimming!

-Visiting the kids schools was just so, so humbling. To see, generally, how young people live, interact, find their identities within their families…it really makes me question the work that I do in Seattle. What is youth empowerment in the context of deep poverty? What is youth empowerment in the context of barren schools with no books, and only a few typewriters that are in the main office? What is youth empowerment in the context of rigid gender roles that also maintain a very real family labor system…that if not maintained can grind a families health and hygiene to a halt? Wow, oh, wow are these big things to think about…and they just humble me when I think about my job.

It probably sounds like the trip was mostly low-key fun, and though it really was fun, what made it so powerful was that underlying everything was an emotional intensity, and some critical realities that I can’t really talk about here, but which gave everything a real electricity. Guatemala makes me feel in a way that makes me realize how numb I usually am. And it really makes me ask myself why I feel so numb so often. But that’s another thing I hope to write more about.

Until then, I’m home, I’m thinking, I’m feeling. And I’m alive, and that’s so, so special.

Much love,

Jeremy

And this week we just had our Seattle branch meeting, and we came to the agreement that it’s time for us to engage in a common project, or a common focus, or even in a common campaign. You know, common action. For a long time, we’ve been doing a lot of internal and structural work. We’ve been doing a lot of consciousness raising events in the community that have built quite a bit of goodwill with fellow radical and progressive groups in the region. And now it looks like we’re ready for a new level of organizing together. Yes!

But the question is what? And how? What is the most valuable type of political struggle for organized anarchists to be doing? How does it differ from organizing that is done by groups from other political tendencies? And if it’s not different, then what is the point of even labeling it as anarchist? These are questions we have discussed frequently in our branch and in our whole organization, but now it’s time to try putting some of those concepts to the test.

Within our particular tendency of anarchism, there is a lot of talk about “social insertion” within mass struggles. That is, engaging humbly and fully within non-anarchist spaces of struggle, so that anarchism’s very practical and principled ideas can be put to use directly at the grassroots. I agree with this tendency, except I have a lot of questions about this notion of “mass struggle.” What is mass struggle in contemporary U.S. society? The anti-war movement? The climate change reform movement? Anti-austerity movements within poor communities? Obama supporters and the netroots? It’s tricky. What if the greatest political potential, the potential for really creative and innovative action, doesn’t exist within current “mass struggles?” Do we hold off on those ideas because they didn’t emerge from a grassroots, non-anarchist base? Or is that kind of idea a fetishization and exotification of “ordinary” people, and their historical destiny to spontaneously spin mass movements out of their own initiative? What about the fact that most of the “mass struggles” we see in U.S. society are actually the products of highly professionalized and well-funded reform groups that are already geared heavily toward policy advocacy and engagement with people in power? What is the anarchist contribution there? There are lots of smart people debating these ideas, as always, and I think it’ll do me some good to start reading more in the radical section of my personal library again…no more liberal progressive mish-mush for awhile, Jeremy.

We won’t have a decision for a little while, and then from there the actual planning and development of the project will take even longer, but even these initial brainstorming conversations are invigorating. Do I finally get to actually try out some of my long-held ideas about praxis, community education, and dual power? It’s a like a dream come true.

And I can tell you now, I have my own ideas unfolding out of the cracks of my mind, and forming into some pretty cool visions. Hopefully I’ll take the time to work out some of those ideas here.