Daily Archives: June 29, 2014

Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Friends, Garden, Great Work, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Right Now

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Summer                                                               Most Heat Moon

My favorite subscription e-mail is brain pickings. The creator and writer, Maria Popova,crane engineering generates it through intense reading and intelligent choice of materials. Last year she wrote an essay outlining 7 things she’s learned in the 7 years of writing brain pickings. You can find the whole essay on her website, but I wanted to focus on one in particular because it reminds me of a lesson I’m learning from my friend, Tom Crane.

Being present, how he shows up in the moment, from moment to moment, is his top priority. I don’t know whether he would counterpoise it to productivity as Popova does here, but his business success in forensic engineering certainly suggests he’s no stranger to productivity. He is clear that he does not want to be measured by his efficiency, earnings or his ability to do this or that. Which is saying something since his company is very well-regarded, growing and prosperous.

Here’s Popova:

  1. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshiping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

And a bit more from an interview with a talented writer/observer:

“I think productivity, as we define it, is flawed to begin with, because it equates a process with a product. So, our purpose is to produce — as opposed to, our purpose is to understand and have the byproduct of that understanding be the “product.” For me, I read, and I hunger to know… I record, around that, my experience of understanding the world and understanding what it means to live a good life, to live a full life. Anything that I write is a byproduct of that — but that’s not the objective. So, even if it may have the appearance of “producing” something on a regular basis, it’s really about taking in, and what I put out is just … the byproduct.”

The moment and our questing in that moment for connection, for understanding, for clear seeing is all we have. Ever. Placing the moment and our immersion in it first swings us out of the past or the future, if we’re tempted to sojourn there, and back to the now.

I like Tom’s insistence on showing up and Popova’s emphasis on understanding as our purpose, and productivity as a byproduct of that process. When at a farmer’s market, it would be understandable to see the fruits and vegetables as a product of gardening, but in fact they are the byproduct of a person in love with the soil, with plants, with the changing seasons and the interplay of wind and rain and sun.

The main dilemmas of our current approach to agriculture can be tied to productivity oriented thinking.  This way sees the fruits and the vegetables and the grains and the meats and dairy as the product of farming rather than its byproduct. What I mean is this, when we love the world in which we live, when we treat it with care and thoughtfulness, when we understand our needs and its needs, the world will produce what is necessary for our existence. That’s been the successful ongoing contract between living beings and the natural world of which they are apart since the first one-celled organism began to wiggle and move. It is no different today.

That’s what I understand right now.

Family, Politics

Domestic Courage

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Summer                                                         Most Heat Moon

Sexism rides through the institutions of our culture: through church and corporation, through the military and onto the athletic field, through higher education and elementary, too. Take medicine for a contemporary example. Since the days of NOW and conscious raising, many, many women have become doctors. According to a recent survey there are approximately 234,000 women physicians compared to 535,000 men. (kaiser fdtn.)

Those 234,000 women are disproportionately in the lower paying medical disciplines though not dominant in any of those either. Pediatrics is the sole exception with women making up 55% of all pediatricians in 2008.  But. They earned 66% what male pediatricians did. (Center for research into gender and the professions.) This link gives more detailed analysis.

Continued activism by feminists (male and female) in the workplace will be necessary for years, perhaps generations, to come.

Personal bravery, I called it domestic courage in a eulogy for Ione, a working woman who raised three daughters on her own, working evenings as a bookkeeper, is necessary though when the political gets personal.  When the issue is culturally determined sex roles, then the political comes home. It has to because there is no social nexus more culturally determined by gender than marriage and family.

Kate is an example of domestic courage and institutional courage. Here are three instances. In high school in Nevada, Iowa during the early 1960’s, Kate did outstanding academic work. This would not surprise anyone who knows her. In time long before advanced placement classes, the International Baccalaureate degree or any other now common place for accelerating advanced students, she asked to graduate in her junior year and then attend nearby Iowa State. Her request, though unusual, was granted. Until it came time to make it happen. Then the school went back on its word.

It’s difficult to imagine in our current educational reality, how much courage it must have taken for a young, beautiful girl to pass up cheer leading and the prom to push for an education that met her intellectual talents. That her attempt failed is neither surprising nor a reflection on the domestic courage it took for her to put herself forward. (I say domestic courage here because of the enmeshed nature of small towns with their elementary and secondary educational systems, an enmeshment I know only too well from my own experiences in Alexandria, Indiana.)

Becoming a physician, after first overcoming sexist objections to her becoming a nurse anesthetist, (a telling picture of her class at Mt. Sinai shows her with seven men), she applied to medical school over the objection of her then husband. The admissions personnel at the medical school told Kate that since she had a physician for a husband what was the point to her ambitions? They slapped a good deal of preliminary work on her, which she did, then accepted her reapplication.

The domestic courage in this instance involved persisting in her own ambitions, in spite of being a young mother and in a demanding marriage. She got through this by studying in the morning, early, before Jon and David got up.

Then, once in medicine, Kate continued her fight against sexist restrictions and organizational assumptions.  The clearest of these was her insistence that low income working women couldn’t afford to take time away during the day for a doctor’s appointment. The Coon Rapids Allina Clinic needed to offer appointments after traditional daytime hours.

When the resistance became obdurate, Kate volunteered to do it herself, which she did for several years until the Clinic decided to open an after hours clinic.

Now, as a grandmother, Kate feels (and I do, too.) a necessity to pass on this kind of consciousness to our grand-daughter Ruth. Sexism will not be eliminated by the time Ruth hits college or the work place. She needs an understanding of her own power and her right to her own path. We can help ensure she gets that.