Anita

She had it dry-cleaned and put it away, layered in tissue, never to be worn again: an aqua-blue, demurely double-buttoned linen dress. To watch Anita Hill unwrap it and shake it out, smiling in a bittersweet, almost affectionate way—as if to say, Oh, if frocks could talk!—was unforgettable. Sure, it bordered on stagy, but there was something wonderful and graceful about Hill’s plucky, good-humored willingness to do this on camera, more than 20 years after the day she spent in that aqua dress, testifying in front of siblings, colleagues, friends, her aging parents and, on the other side of that big green table, a battalion of white guys in suits who called themselves the Senate Judiciary Committee.

By this point in documentary filmmaker Freida Mock’s latest film, called simply Anita, I was so brimming with outrage that this quiet moment in Hill’s closet came as an urgent relief. Reliving Hill’s testimony about sexual harassment by then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas was like reliving a bad, bad dream.

But the news has been like that lately. The way the senators turned Hill’s willingness to shine a light on a nominee to the nation’s highest court into an opportunity to question her morals, her credibility and her dignity was powerfully reminiscent of the stories many military women have told recently about how they were treated when they tried to report sexual harassment or rape. The senators’ behavior also reminded me of Chris Cuomo’s slimy CNN interview of Amanda Knox. The brutal truth is: two decades after Anita Hill’s testimony, there are still men who apparently find it sporting to force women to use words they would rather not use—and then watch them squirm. There are men who learned nothing from our country’s most notorious sexual harassment scandal beyond what Clarence Thomas learned: when it’s one person’s word against another’s, it’s much better to be male.

Twenty years ago, I was a new mom and I remember thinking: I do not want my daughter to grow up in a world where this happens. But she has grown up in such a world. Anita Hill’s brave testimony could not single-handedly end sexual harassment.

However: it did change things.

Hill’s legacy is most visible toward the end of the film, when you see her speaking to groups of young women and then you see some of those women, in turn, leading groups of teenage girls in frank discussions about sexual harassment and gender equality. This is good news: that more and more women, especially younger women, no longer feel, as Hill did, that their best strategy is to remain silent.

Walking out of SIFF Cinema after a preview screening of Anita, it was vividly clear who has had the more powerful impact on history: not Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who is known mainly for his silence on the bench, but Anita Hill, who has spoken about, written about and become a powerful symbol of the real meaning of that overused phrase, “speaking truth to power.” Twenty-two years ago, she was Truth. Power didn’t like it. The spectacle wasn’t pretty, but it was unforgettable.

Anita is screening at the Seattle Film Festival on May 25^th, 26^th and 27^th. Go to SIFF.net for tickets and information.

News Flash: My August 2012 story in Seattle Metropolitan Magazine about younger-onset Alzheimer’s disease won first place in health reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists. Honored and grateful to Sharon Monaghan and Cathie Cannon for sharing their story with me. 

Radio lovers: you can hear the Restless Nest commentaries every Tuesday at 7:45 a.m. on KBCS, streaming online at kbcs.fm and on the air at 91.3 in the Seattle area.  Podcasts available.

Here’s nest artist Kim Groff-Harrington’s website.

A Girl, Alone

If he’s still alive, he’s old and probably fat by now. That guy I try never to think about. His face has faded, but I remember him as a little doughy. That guy who did to me what I could not bring myself to call rape at the time.

I was traveling alone. I’d missed the overnight train from Geneva to Paris. He offered me a spare bedroom; swore I’d be perfectly safe. To my 19-year-old eyes, he looked trustworthy, this 30-something pilot in an expensive trenchcoat. So surely it was my fault, right? When I woke up in the wee hours of the morning and he was on top of me?

Judge me if you will. Call me stupid and naïve; that much is fair. But who ever judged him? No one. Yet I knew I didn’t have a story to tell a Swiss police officer. So I got on the train and went back to my study-abroad dorm room in England, feeling a little wiser and a lot older.

When I got back to the States, I wrote a short story about it in which I tried to be very Hemingway-esque, starkly describing what happened but leaving out all details about how I felt. Because of course I didn’t know I felt. Or rather, I felt so many different feelings I didn’t know which was the real one: shame? Anger? Sadness? Outrage?

They were all real and they have all been flooding back to me this month, which has not been a good one for the one out of four American women who harbor memories of sexual assault. First, there was arrest of the head of the Air Force sexual assault prevention program—on charges of sexual battery. Then, just two days later, the Pentagon released survey data revealing in 2012, an estimated 26 thousand active service women and men were sexually assaulted, up from 19 thousand in 2010.

And now we have Amanda Knox out on her book tour, being interviewed by piranhas like CNN’s Chris Cuomo, who so relished interrogating her about the rumors of her “deviant” sex life. Never mind she’s been convicted of murder in Italy, jailed for four years, acquitted and now may be tried again.

No wonder I found myself fuming recently when I saw a TV commercial in which two dads exchange those “boys will be boys!” looks when they catch their sons spying on a female neighbor from their treehouse. What if the ad showed little girls watching a man undress? Would we think that was adorable?

In his eagerness to pry salacious details out of Knox, Cuomo reminded me of the boys in the commercial. But Knox’s long legal nightmare has taught her how to remain calm in the face of the ugliest accusations.

“I was sexually active. I was not sexually deviant,” she said, clearly and without elaboration. In that instant, she became the grownup in the room and Cuomo the prurient child, still stuck in his adolescent treehouse.

Collective outrage over military rape may be what takes us to the tipping point where we can no longer tolerate the double standard inherent in an interview like Cuomo’s. I hope so. Because this is about more than raising boys to treat women with respect. This is about raising girls to understand: shame and guilt need not be their default emotional settings. So when a soldier is groped, she doesn’t immediately think it must be her fault. Or when a naïve girl from Seattle is interviewed by Italian police, she can’t be bullied and intimidated.

Or when another naïve Seattle girl sets out to see the world, she won’t spend the rest of her life thinking what happened one night in Geneva was ALL her fault.

Radio lovers: you can hear the Restless Nest commentaries every Tuesday at 7:45 a.m. on KBCS, streaming online at kbcs.fm and on the air at 91.3 in the Seattle area.  Podcasts available.

Here’s nest artist Kim Groff-Harrington’s website.

Filters

My email spam blocker is having filtration problems. So am I. Just as the diet, mortgage, dating, credit report, e-cig and language learning messages flow nonstop to my laptop, so does every conceivable distraction flow into my brain. I want to get some work done, I really do. But then I look out the open window and there’s that purple car with the green trim and jacked up wheels, circling the block again. And in the park across the street, there are the tween-age boys playing pickup basketball, while the younger boys watch longingly. Moms with strollers and cellphones and dogs walk by like little mobile juggling acts. Tiny girls in hijab run toward the swings. Maybe I should not try to work near an open window on a spring day.

There are distractions inside, too: we all know what a dangerous Pandora’s box a laptop or a smartphone is. But what I don’t know is this: why am I sometimes better at filtering and focusing and other times, I’m just not?

Often, I think it’s a problem of accumulated experience. I know that sounds like a too-sly way of saying “age,” but stay with me. Because what I mean is this: I think my filtering problem is due to a ridiculous over-abundance, a lifetime buildup, of past references for all the stimuli outside the window or on the screen or wherever my busy brain might be.

I hear kids playing ball and my mind reels back to growing up near another neighborhood park, in another part of Seattle, where I watched my skinny big brother don all kinds of strange armor and head up the hill to play Little League Football. How I cringed, imagining him getting knocked down and trampled by all those beefier boys. And from there, my brain skips ahead to his three sons, young adults now, and—you see? How hopeless it is, to stay focused? Don’t even get me started on the stroller moms and all the memories they conjure up. And the little girls in their bright scarves and how I’ve been to so many countries, but not to theirs.

It is such hard work to filter distractions in our hyper-distracted world, especially if everything you see, hear or read can trigger a whole decades-long chain of memories.

And often, we have experiences we really need to allow ourselves to dwell on, but instead we plunge into the nearest distraction at hand.

After the Boston bombings, I thought what I needed to do was comb the Internet news sites, Twitter, Facebook to see what the latest was and what people were saying about it. But what I needed much more was simply to talk to actual humans: to my husband, friends, children. To shake our heads together, to share the shock, to mourn.

A happier example, this time of year in Seattle, is the sun finally coming out. We know what we crave: to feel it on our faces. To be out in it. We can try to lash ourselves to our desks, pretend we’re getting work done—when really we’re checking the weather websites and other peoples’ photos of the sun setting over the Olympics—but really, what is the point? Why not go outside, bask, stroll, stretch—and then take that good feeling back indoors?

Be warned: feeling the sun on your face will remind you of all the past springs of your life. It will be hard to filter that memory deluge. But you might not want to.

This week’s shameless plug: my daughter Claire Thompson wrote a great essay for Grist on millennials. Check it out!

Radio lovers: you can hear the Restless Nest commentaries every Tuesday at 7:45 a.m. on KBCS, streaming online at kbcs.fm and on the air at 91.3 in the Seattle area.  Podcasts available.

Here’s nest artist Kim Groff-Harrington’s website.

Resilience

 “I know a young person who needs this,” whispered the woman sitting next to me at a fundraising event for a social services agency. She was talking about a small polished rock, on which the word “Courage” was engraved. There was one at every place setting: a little reminder for each guest to take home.

“You know, I do too,” I said. I slipped my rock into my purse, thinking of a young adult I know who is addicted to heroin. He doesn’t want to be. Who wants to live life enslaved to a drug? I’ve lost count of how many times he’s detoxed and rehabbed. Each relapse takes another chunk out of his store of hope. I pray daily that he won’t run out altogether. But this has been going on for a while now, and so where I find a shred of optimism is in a paradoxical thought: maybe, I tell myself, though he drew the bad card of addiction, he was also endowed with an inner core of resilience. There’s something in him that makes him strong enough to keep trying.

Why is it that some humans are resilient and others are not? I’m reading Nicole Krauss’ poignant novel The History of Love right now and marveling at the resilience of the main character, an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor named Leo Gursky. Somehow, Leo transcended the temptation to give up, or to define himself through hate, even though his family had been wiped out by the irrational hatred of the Nazis. Leo grew up on a scrap of the map claimed, at various times, by Poland, the Czech Republic, Germany and the Soviet Union. As a young man without family or friends, he started over in the United States, just like millions of immigrants before and since. For him, statelessness was a clean slate.

For others, it is lighter fluid just waiting for a match to flame it up into resentment, anger, vengefulness. Ireland, Israel, Iraq come to mind. The statelessness of ethnic Chechens may have played a part in the Boston Marathon bombs.

But why? Why do the hardships of war, repression, migration breed resilience in some and hatred in others?

The fundraiser I attended featured speakers who had survived horrific domestic violence and found the courage to get help and begin life anew. Two were women who had been severely injured by their abusers. One speaker was a man whose marriage ended after he threatened his wife. He sought help, and finally—in the middle of his life—learned how to behave nonviolently. How to build resilience through peace and compassion instead of abuse and control. It was an act of willful self-reprogramming not unlike what a drug addict must do in order to end his addiction. It took courage, just as it took courage for the other two speakers to save themselves and their children and start a new life.

Courage comes from the Latin word for heart. It’s about rock-like, inner strength. To be resilient, on the other hand, is to be elastic. It comes from a Latin root meaning to “jump back.” To bounce, not break. To weather change. To blossom after a drought, a hurricane, a hailstorm. Naturalist Ann Haymond Zwinger writes that “flowering is, after all, not an aesthetic contribution but a survival mechanism.” This was clear to me as I listened to the survivors of domestic violence, whose joyful blooming was so visible. Such a testament to what is possible when resilience meets courage. Which really is such a good word to put on a rock.

Radio lovers: you can hear the Restless Nest commentaries every Tuesday at 7:45 a.m. on KBCS, streaming online at kbcs.fm and on the air at 91.3 in the Seattle area.  Podcasts available.

Here’s nest artist Kim Groff-Harrington’s website.

 

 

Boston

One September day, when I was still a child but thought I was not, off I flew to Boston. My checked bags included a shiny trunk in a retro black and white pattern and a sky blue Skyway suitcase. I wore a new plaid blouse, brown corduroys and a brown hooded sweater. I was 17 and I didn’t look a day older.

Boston received me the way Boston does: with a bit of a yawn. Oh, here she comes; yet another wide-eyed rube from the Wild West come east to get some schooling. Sorry, sweetheart, but you’re a dime a dozen in this town. Never mind: have some chowder. Have a corn muffin. You want your coffee regular? Which in Boston, of course, means with cream and sugar.

I didn’t care, because I knew my real life was beginning.

In the mayhem of this past week, in our global obsession with Boston, with the bombs at the marathon finish line and who put them there and why; in our grief for the dead and injured, one of President Obama’s finest moments slipped under the news radar. On Thursday, hours before the terror and drama of the manhunt began, before we knew anything about two brothers with roots in Chechnya, the people of Boston gathered at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross to mourn. It was an interfaith service featuring many eloquent speakers. I happened to catch most of it on the radio. But it was our president who made me cry, because he reminded me what Boston means to me and to so very many others, including Michelle, including him.

“There’s a piece of Boston in me,” the President said, and I knew exactly what he meant. He recalled how the city welcomed him as a young law student. He talked about how he and Michelle knew its streets and squares.

“For millions of us,” the president said, “what happened on Monday is personal. It’s personal.” Yes it is.

When I went off to college, my destination was Wellesley, way out in the suburbs. After graduating from public high school in pre-Microsoft, pre-Nirvana Seattle, Wellesley—with its foreign princesses, New York sophisticates, New England bluebloods—was the first great culture shock of my life.  When the hothouse atmosphere got to be too much for me, Boston was where I went for relief.

I didn’t mind the long trip on the bus or the T. I craved the cobbled streets of Back Bay and Beacon Hill. I needed the cacophony of Park Street Station, the expanse of Copley Square. I reveled in the anonymity of cafes where even a greenhorn girl from out west could blend in. Boston wasn’t New York, but it was urban in ways that Seattle was not. It was historic, but it felt familiar: all my life, I’d heard of Harvard Yard, Old North Church, Boston Harbor, but I’d never seen them. And now here they were, like long-lost relatives who had been waiting to meet me.

In his speech, Obama quoted a poem by E.B. White, in which White calls Boston not a capital or a place, but a perfect “state of grace.” I suspect White, a New Yorker, meant it more playfully than ponderously. But Obama lifted the phrase up a few notches, and I don’t think White, the author of Charlotte’s Web, would have minded. He would have understood our post-marathon need for grace, the way Charlotte the spider-who-saved-a-pig understood, the way Boston understands when it welcomes naïve students and runners from around the world who have dreamed of this place, who need it, who will make it a part of the new selves they are creating. For whom this city and what happens to it will always be personal.

 Check out my recent guest blog on Minervarising.com: inspired by Brenda Miller and Holly Hughes’ wonderful book, The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. 

Radio lovers: you can hear the Restless Nest commentaries every Tuesday at 7:45 a.m. on KBCS, streaming online at kbcs.fm and on the air at 91.3 in the Seattle area.  Podcasts available.

Here’s nest artist Kim Groff-Harrington’s website.

Homework

It’s almost 5:30. Time to walk the one block from my front door to the neighborhood center where I volunteer once a week as a homework tutor for Horn of Africa Services, a nonprofit serving Seattle’s East African community. I wonder what challenges await me today. Will I find myself trying to explain what a “bale of hay” is? Corral the attention of a first-grader who is convinced the police car in the alley might be here for someone he knows? Search for scissors and a glue stick for a “word-sorting” homework assignment that involves pasting postage-sized pictures of words with similar endings in the correct columns? The word-sort worksheet makes me wonder if the teacher who assigned it really enjoys the mental picture of parents and other homework helpers, like me, down on our knees gathering up flyaway scraps of homework confetti. (I don’t remember my own children having to use glue to do homework very often, though there was that one multi-day, sweat-and-tear-stained project that called for recreating Fort Vancouver out of popsicle sticks.)

At a training for volunteers, Program Director Dereje Zewdie began by defining culture as, quote, “what makes you a stranger when you’re away from home.” Walking to the tutoring center, I’m only a few hundred yards from where I now live. A mere ten miles from the house where I grew up. I don’t think about My Culture because I live in it. It is omnipresent; as invisible as air.

But all that changes when I open the door and walk in. Nearly everyone else in the room is about nine thousand miles, give or take, from the place they or their parents call home. And so Culture, the whole concept of it, is suddenly present, visible, tangible. Their culture, my culture—our rules, beliefs, traditions, language, values; everything human families transmit from one generation to the next—hovers around us.

What breaks the ice is the goal we all share: to get the homework done. The packets are due Friday, so we’re down to the wire on Thursday evenings. Huddled together over word sorts and math problems; over assigned stories full of puzzlers like “bales of hay;” we forget for an hour or two how strange we are to each other. Me with my uncovered, blonde-brown-gray hair. They with their colorful hijab.

There usually are not enough tutors to work one on one, so we juggle. I might find myself reading out loud with a kindergartener and a first-grader, stopping every few minutes to help a second grader add columns. After an hour of this, I often feel like my brain has been scissored into word-sort confetti.

According to Historylink’s 2010 article on Seattle’s Somali community, Somali students are the second largest bilingual group in the Seattle Public Schools. Amharic, Tigrinya and Oromo are also among the top eight languages spoken in the district. Seattle King County Public Health estimates there are about 40 thousand East African immigrants in King County. Some nonprofit organizations put the number much higher.

I’m not an academically valuable tutor. My math skills are rudimentary. But I’m comfortable around children, and I can put a LOT of gusto into reading and writing. Over my first several months, I’ve seen a few readers shift from stop-and-go to full-speed-ahead, and that is gratifying, even though I played only a small, once-a-week part in their progress.

In a recent Crosscut column, former Trade Development Alliance of Greater Seattle President Bill Stafford pointed out that Bellevue is now over 30 percent foreign born and Seattle 25 percent. “Whether you are a newspaper, theater company, medical provider or retailer,” writes Stafford, “to be successful, you must understand the changing demographics of the Puget Sound community.”

I appreciate his point, even though I am not any of those things. What keeps me coming back on Thursdays is: these are my neighbors. I want to know them better. If I had different talents, I might find some other way to do that. But for me, sounding out words with 6 and 7-year-olds is a place to start.

Our films, The Church on Dauphine Street, 30 Frames a Second: The WTO in Seattle and Quick Brown Fox: an Alzheimer’s Story are available on Hulu, Amazon and other digital sites.

Radio lovers: you can hear the Restless Nest commentaries every Tuesday at 7:45 a.m. on KBCS, streaming online at kbcs.fm and on the air at 91.3 in the Seattle area. Podcasts available.

Here’s nest artist Kim Groff-Harrington’s website.

Hard-wired for Green

We are hard-wired for green. It’s a phrase I heard for the first time this week, and it is lodged in my brain at the moment like an advertising jingle I secretly like. Hard-wired for green: meaning, you can strip away everything you’ve learned since birth and you will still primally, viscerally, respond like a seedling in the sun to the sight of new green growth. You will feel reassured by this evidence that the planet, or at least one bit of it, is still alive and well. You will feel energized—if these plants can grow, then I can too.

You might think I heard this in some sort of eco-oriented setting, and you’d be right, if you stretched your notion of ecology to include the complex landscape of the brain. It was the keynote speaker at the regional Alzheimer’s conference who planted the “hard-wired for green” seed in my head. Sociologist and author John Zeisel was talking about what people with Alzheimer’s don’t lose as the disease goes about its inexorable business. What they don’t lose is what is “hard-wired;” so deeply embedded that we’re born with it. Positive feelings about green, especially trees, were at the top of his list, which also included: universal facial expressions—smiles, frowns and the look of disgust; response to touch, especially anything resembling a mother’s touch; the learning and use of landmarks; and, finally, creative expression: art, poetry, music and dance.

Zeisel is a tireless advocate for the “personhood” of the person with dementia, as reflected in the title of his book, I’m Still Here—a New Philosophy of Alzheimer’s Care. His credo is to focus not on what’s lost to Alzheimer’s, but on what’s left. He likes to throw around phrases like, “People with Alzheimer’s have a human right to lead a life worth living.”

If you, like me, are one of the millions of people in the world who have seen Alzheimer’s disease up close in someone you love, this is emotionally loaded territory. Our mother lived into the very late stages of the illness, and I can attest that green trees, facial expressions and touch remained powerful for her. But as that little phrase, “hardwired for green,” settles into my brain, I am struck by the larger truths behind Zeisel’s list. By how these visceral, hardwired pleasures nurture not only those of us whose brains are ill but those of us who are well.

And here’s what I wonder: if we modern, multi-tasking humans allow ourselves to revel in green, in smiles, in human touch, in creative expression… will those primal elements be even more present for us, even more accessible, when we need them at the ends of our lives? We won’t know until we get there. But surely we’ll have a richer ride through the years.

At the other end of life, arts education is back in the news and beginning to recover its lost momentum. People are talking about how yes, the STEM subjects—Science, Technology, Engineering and Math—are crucial, but if you put the A for Art back in and call it STEAM, you add creative thinking to the mix, which might be the most powerful ingredient of all. As an apprentice in Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools program, I see this every week. Poetry, music, art and dance come naturally to children who haven’t yet locked them away in some “that’s not who I am” category.

And getting back to green: that hard-wired response is front and center this time of year. For children and for all of us. As my mom often said, long after most other phrases had failed her, “Look at these trees! We live in such a beautiful place.”

Don’t miss Bill Hayes’ beautiful essay about trees published in the Sunday New York Times.

Our films, Quick Brown Fox: an Alzheimer’s Story, The Church on Dauphine Street and 30 Frames a Second: The WTO in Seattle are available on Hulu, Amazon and other digital sites.

Radio lovers: you can hear the Restless Nest commentaries every Tuesday at 7:50 a.m., Thursdays at 4:54 p.m. and Fridays at 4:55 p.m. on KBCS, streaming online at kbcs.fm and on the air at 91.3 in the Seattle area.  Podcasts available.

Here’s nest artist Kim Groff-Harrington’s website.

Impatience

“Patience is a virtue.” Who first said that, and why? A quick Internet search points to a few “medieval poets.” Let’s leave it there—in the dark ages—and move on: to why patience is on my mind, and not in a virtuous, well-behaved way.

I just spent an evening at Seattle’s Town Hall listening to five dynamic women speak at an event, sponsored by the Women’s Funding Alliance, called “Fresh Perspective: Women Lead a Changing World.” Good title; wish it were true.

The speakers had some good news to share—the dramatic increase in the numbers of women obtaining bachelors, masters and PhD degrees; the previously unheard of opportunities for women in government, science, technology, sports.

But “Women Lead a Changing World?” No. Not very many of us are leading. Not by a long shot. And the world may be changing, but it sure is taking its time. And we’ve been far too patient.

It is time we made a virtue of impatience.

When eight of every ten corporations in Washington state have fewer than three women on their boards, it is time to be impatient.

When women in Washington* earn 75 cents for every dollar men earn—73 cents, if you have kids; 60 cents if you’re a single mom—it’s time to be impatient.

When Washington slips from first to eighth in the nation for female political representation, it’s time to be impatient.

When 415 thousand women and girls in our state have no health insurance, when reproductive rights are under assault, when one out of four children in our state don’t have enough to eat—impatience. Please. Now!

Kristin Rowe Finkbeiner of MomsRising.org nailed it when she said that what we have here is a “national structural issue, not an epidemic of personal failings.” We women are far too expert at blaming ourselves for problems like finding high-quality affordable childcare in a country where it is nearly impossible to put “high-quality” and “affordable” in the same sentence.

All of the speakers dealt deftly with the recently published elephant in the room: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead. Finkbeiner urged us to “lean together.” Award-winning Seattle Art Museum educator Sandra Jackson-Dumont praised Sandberg for igniting important conversations at a crucial time for women.

Full disclosure: I haven’t read Sandberg’s book, but I will. If she is igniting conversations, that’s a good thing. Conversations have a way of triggering collective impatience.

Women are more than half the electorate and, for the first time in history, half the paid labor force. We make 85 percent of purchasing decisions. Collectively, our impatience could have an impact.

And there are so many ways we could put it to work.

We can encourage each other to run for office, to seek out board positions, to stretch ourselves towards leadership by learning the skills we think we might lack and daring to use the skills and wisdom we know we have. We can go beyond simply voting and send emails, make phone calls, write OpEds and letters to the editor about the issues that matter to us.

I’m speaking in particular, here, to my age-mates. We know how busy women who are juggling work and child-rearing are because we were just there. Now, it’s our turn to lean together, work together. Get usefully, virtuously impatient. Together.

 *Research cited in this piece was provided by Lori Pfingst of the Washington State Budget & Policy Center, Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner of MomsRising, Ada Williams Prince of One America and Jennifer Stuller of GeekGirlCon.

Radio lovers: you can hear the Restless Nest commentaries every Tuesday at 7:50 a.m., Thursdays at 4:54 p.m. and Fridays at 4:55 p.m. on KBCS, streaming online at kbcs.fm and on the air at 91.3 in the Seattle area.  Podcasts available.

Our films, The Church on Dauphine Street, 30 Frames a Second: The WTO in Seattle and Quick Brown Fox: an Alzheimer’s Story are available on Hulu, Amazon and other digital sites.

Here’s nest artist Kim Groff-Harrington’s website.

 

 

Borders

I grew up in a world of well-marked borders between work and the rest of life. Work was something my father did in an office downtown, not ever at home. I knew he was an “insurance agent” but I didn’t know, or really care, what that meant. Work was what he did to earn money. That’s all work meant.

When my parents divorced, the Mad Men lifestyle they had modeled for us ended, at least at our house, for good. My mother went back to college and became a teacher, daily demonstrating to her six children how thoroughly work and the rest of life could and did mix when necessary. Her evenings were filled with making dinner, grading papers, paying bills, grading more papers. But still I thought of work as what you did to earn money.

These days, I’m not sure what to think.

I do plenty of work that is important to me for which I don’t get paid. I write these radio commentaries. I create independent documentary films with my husband, Rustin Thompson. This unpaid work gets all mixed in, every day, with our paying work. The borders are porous and the benefits flow both ways. We bring more creative energy to the work we do for our clients—nearly all of them hard-working nonprofits in the Puget Sound area—who in turn inspire us to be creative. Meanwhile, there’s cooking, housework, family time, all going into the daily mix.

Believe me, ours is not a great business model, if you define business in terms of dollars and cents. But it’s a life model that I have come to believe is more natural for us modern humans than Mad Men style separation. For centuries before the industrial revolution, farmers, craftsmen, artisans, shopkeepers lived and worked in the same place. Now that we’re post-industrial, many of us have returned to a home-based or borderless working life. (My late brother, an early computer prodigy who designed software from his home office, used to call himself a “software farmer.”)

The dark side of this is the much-bemoaned syndrome of always being chained—either by necessity or choice—to your work via the phone in your pocket. The bright side is when it can all blend together in the best ways.

During the Depression, Robert Frost wrote a poem called “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” about two hungry hobos who showed up in his New England yard just as he was getting ready to split wood—a task he loved and which, he implies in the poem, inspired him creatively. But he knew the tramps needed the work, and he knew he would offer it. “My right might be love but theirs was need,” Frost wrote.

The poem concludes with an ode to the best option of all: when work is done from love and need: “Only where love and need are one,/And the work is play for mortal stakes,/ Is the deed ever really done/For heaven and the future’s sakes.”

As I watch my own young adult children launch their working lives, my hope for them is that they will be able to meet their needs doing work they love. It’s a good goal. But as it has been for us, it might have to be a blend: some work done for love, some for need, some for love and need.

Radio lovers: you can hear the Restless Nest commentaries every Tuesday at 7:50 a.m., Thursdays at 4:54 p.m. and Fridays at 4:55 p.m. on KBCS, streaming online at kbcs.fm and on the air at 91.3 in the Seattle area.  Podcasts available.

Here’s nest artist Kim Groff-Harrington’s website.

 

Meaning: Searching and/or Finding

Trying to fill a room in Seattle is a fickle business. On the first day of 2013 that felt like spring was not just a dream some of us had, who ever would’ve guessed that 25 hundred Seattle souls would willingly converge for a collection of lectures called the Search for Meaning Book Festival? And this was a free event: advance registration encouraged, but no fifty dollar commitment. No reason why you couldn’t just say, “Are you kidding? I’m going to Golden Gardens!” after you pulled back the curtains on a morning flood of daffodil-yellow sunlight.

Now in its fifth year, the Search for Meaning Book Festival just keeps growing. It is hosted by Seattle University’s School of Theology and Ministry, but the authors and speakers come from every religious tradition, including none-of-the-above. This year’s keynotes were a conversation between authors Sherman Alexie and Michael Chabon in the morning and a riveting talk by Iranian-American writer Reza Aslan in the afternoon. Before and after the keynotes were seminars, of which we attendees had to choose three or four out of nearly four dozen. Topics ranged from searching for meaning in suffering to the ethics of sustainable seafood. Highlights for me were Port Townsend poet Holly Hughes’ session on contemplation and creativity and Stranger Genius Award-winner Lesley Hazleton’s talk on the life of Muhammad.

But I digress. Back to the weather. Next time you’re on Capitol Hill, stroll a few blocks south and you’ll find yourself in a little green oasis: the Seattle University campus. Not such a bad place to be on a bizarrely sunny March day. Strolling back and forth between seminars, the Cascade Mountains glittered in the east, the trees were budding, the camellias popping, the fountains spraying. Inside the lovely Chapel of Saint Ignatius, the sunlit blue of the stained glass was so vibrant it vibrated.

West of campus, just across the street, is Swedish Hospital, where I have often found meaning waiting for me, whether I wanted it there or not: in the joy of greeting newborn babies; the sorrow of saying good-bye to a friend in her final days.

Truth be told, I was having trouble with meaning that morning at Seattle University. I had just learned that a child I know might have cancer.  It is hard to find meaning in that kind of news. I didn’t go to the Search for Meaning Book Festival expecting to find an answer there, but I thought maybe I’d find distraction. Or some vague kind of comfort.

The first seminar I attended was… exactly wrong. Right, no doubt, for adults facing major illness, but wrong for brooding me, wrestling with why children should ever have to face such horrors. Maybe I should have just skipped all this and gone to Golden Gardens, I thought, as I headed over to the keynote. I’ve heard Sherman Alexie AND Michael Chabon before—why am I here?

But Sherman Alexie is a charmer. He had me with his crack about dining on “kosher buffalo” with Chabon. And as Alexie encouraged Chabon to ramble on about the waxing and waning of his Jewish faith, I looked around the room and thought, Here’s the comfort: 2500 people who are curious, who are listeners and questioners, who actually want to search for meaning, even on a sunny day.

Chabon tossed off a line that stuck with me: “Searching and not finding is much more satisfying than finding.”

Later in the day, the Jesuit President of Seattle University, Father Steven Sundborg—a man who you might assume has Meaning all figured out—asked this: Do we seek meaning, or does meaning seek us?

He posed the question in his introduction to Reza Aslan, whose hour-long talk vigorously tackled the rising American fear of Islam: how it has morphed, over the dozen years since 9-11, into a right-wing-fueled, bigotry-stoking machine.

Aslan had lots of data. But ultimately, he said, data doesn’t change minds. What changes minds is relationships.

Because we’re all searching for meaning. It’s what we do. And it is comforting to know, on one bright Saturday in Seattle, that we’re not alone.

Radio lovers: you can hear the Restless Nest commentaries every Tuesday at 7:50 a.m., Thursdays at 4:54 p.m. and Fridays at 4:55 p.m. on KBCS, streaming online at kbcs.fm and on the air at 91.3 in the Seattle area.  Podcasts available.

Here’s nest artist Kim Groff-Harrington’s website.