courage : mackenzian

May 22, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Unnecessary ties

Dependence of church members on civil government for material support should be avoided if possible, especially where such dependence would interfere with the Christian’s freedom to testify to the government of Christ.” —Friends of Truth / Glenside Friends Meeting, Christian Conduct

Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us…” —Hebrews 12

I know people who run races with giant tires chained to their waists—by choice. It’s resistance and strength training, and it works.

It’s also entirely voluntary. After their training and races are over, they take the tires and the chains off. They don’t walk through their entire life weighed down.

I’m learning from them, from my Quaker siblings, and from the writer of Hebrews.

The early Quakers interpreted this principle in terms of being bonded to the state, but it doesn’t only have to refer to those kinds of entanglements.

It could also mean not accepting work that you know includes ethical conflicts or people who’ll hamper your ability to resolve those conflicts. It might mean reconsidering your relationships and finally replacing old relational habits.

It’s not just a rule about what to do; it’s a rule about why it’s worth doing.

Cutting unnecessary ties and shedding unnecessary chains means relieving yourself of those “weights” that limit, discourage, and repress rather freeing and inspiring you to walk out your best values and sense of call.

I love that this verse follows a long account of community heroes—that “cloud of witnesses.”

As we change our lives, we’re in good company. Trimming connections that “hinder” you can just as easily mean walking in the footsteps of elders, mentors, colleagues, and friends. It doesn’t always have to mean stepping away from the known world into isolation.

Seek out the stories of those who’ve followed the paths you’re on. Situate yourself in their midst and allow them to nourish you. And then “run,” as they did, “with endurance.”

May 2, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

The courage to be selectively transparent

Despite a 20-year healthy career in television and film, Taraji P. Henson is still a radically underestimated actor and producer.

From the ABC/WB series, Sister Sister, to this year’s Hidden Figures, Henson has shown remarkable persistence with her acting career, something that’s only benefited the characters whose stories she chooses to tell.

Not much in that career would have come together had Henson also digested others’ attempts to undermine her concerns.

In my personal sphere, I’ve been working on cultivating the kinds of friendships that allow me to share grief, range, love, and loss without filtering, and allow others to share that with me.

When that isn’t possible, I use my filter to protect my fresh ideas and work from people who don’t have the capacity (whether right now or ever) to walk along the way with me yet do plenty of time and energy to sneer from a distance.

Sometimes people’s advice is less about you, though, and more about them pulling you down to their own limited expectations.

Henson says in a short web-video, “If you allow people to project their fear onto you, you won’t live.”

That’s my experience too.

Watch the captioned version and be encouraged!

February 18, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Lorde and Morrison on identity and action

Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison were born on the same birthdate, February 18: Morrison in 1931 and Lorde in 1934.

Thanks to the good folks at Many Voices, I’ve been listening to Audre Lorde speaking to students at UCLA. The date of the lecture is unclear, but the video uploader places the session in the early 1990s.

She begins by inviting the audience to inquire of themselves, “Who am I and how do I use who I am in the service of what I believe?”

Then Lorde reads from her stories of her childhood and early adult in the East Village, New York City, learning to recognize her identity as Black, woman, and lesbian, and how each of these components of what made her her also differentiated her life experiences from those of the people around her.

The talk is about an hour long and includes an extended Q&A session with UCLA’s students on seeking and building community and being courageous.

Some of the highlights:

“We recognized oppression as oppression no matter where it came from. It is not the function of a woman—any woman—to love or to accept the psyche of her oppressor, even when that psyche is embodied in another woman.”
“As we identify who we are, we begin the journey to use that power. It is what empowerment is all about. Power that is not used is dangerous because power is never quiescent; it’s never neutral. If I do not use my power, however relative it is; if I do not find out what it is and learn how to use it, someone else is using it. The power you do not use, is being used against us.”
“We get strong by doing the thing we need to be strong for. So there’s always that little risk. And yes, you’re afraid. We’ll always be afraid. If we wait until we’re not afraid to move, not afraid to act, [then] we’ll be sending little messages on the Ouija board… I started out like we all started out: like a coward.”
“You must have a group where you feel articulated and accepted. And if it doesn’t exist, you have a responsibility to create it.”
“Isolation is corrosive and it is dangerous. It is anti-revolutionary, too, which is why so many of us exist in isolation. Get together. If there are two of us doing something, maybe next week, there’ll be four. You need to know you are not alone. And you have a responsibility to make whoever you identify with know that they are not alone either.”

I wonder how Toni Morrison would respond to Lorde’s concept of collective courage: Morrison draws strength from a more solitary generative process.

She describes writing as an act of creation that connects her with the external world and gives her the tools to interpret the world and reinvent it. Morrison has said that the artist and writer have the power to challenge tyrannies and that they do that work by persistently creating and writing.

“There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear,” she wrote.

I first quoted that statement in March 2015. Six years beforehand that, Morrison explained to UC-Davis’ Pam Houston how writing allows her to experience the good news that we can continue to grow: wherever we start in our understanding of ourselves or our sense of connection to the wider world isn’t the end of our story. We can, as Lorde said, grow more courageous through disciplined action. We can perceive others more clearly as we attend to the world around us.

Toni: I feel more friendly when I am writing, nicer to people, much more generous, also wiser. I am full of a kind of tenderness toward people and all they have to hide, all they have to construct. Not pity, not sympathy, just tenderness. Knowing that the job of being a human is so hard, and it is the only job there is left—though we keep on pretending otherwise. If I am in that good place and I run into someone I dislike, I feel more human and they seem more human…

There are all sorts of ways people try to stay connected, try not to live in hate. Religion may be one of them, but for me the central thing is the writing. The art itself. Putting my intelligence and my humanity to the best possible use, and I get better because I am doing it. The writing teaches me that I can’t just reach some little plateau and say that’s it, this is the place. It is always a search.

Pam: And that is the good news.

Toni: That is the good news.”

Read the rest.

November 11, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

A sense of scale

I went on a long walk after work yesterday—about 40 New York City blocks. Some of that time I spent in the thick of a massive, traffic-snarling street march; the rest of the time I walked parallel to it instead. We’d been blanketed in grey clouds all day, and it was finally drizzling.

Just when I’d decided it was time for me to find the nearest subway station and head home to a salted bath, a young woman came up to me.

“What are they chanting?” She gestured to the marchers, some of whom carried signs and shouted call and response slogans.

I recited some of the chants I’d heard, and told her they were a mixed multitude of people distressed about their new president-elect. She took in the sight of hundreds of youth pounding the pavement, and she burst into tears.

“We’ll survive four years,” I said to her. “Even eight—we’ll survive it. We’ve done it before.”

About 14 months ago, I met with Penobscot tribal historian James Neptune, and asked him, among other things, how long his people had lived on the land around central Maine.

“Oh, 12,000 years,” he said.

That’s longer than my 12 years in the US; much, much more than the United States’ 238 years of nationhood; and a respectable chunk of human history on Earth.

The scale of time is something that can easily recede from awareness during a crisis. The overview effect transforms the astronauts who get to see Earth as it hangs in space, and a sense of geological and anthropological time can serve a similar function. Perhaps it’s even more accessible than the overview effect: you don’t have to be an elite scientist or technologist to perceive it yourself.

At a recent conference on the Black radical tradition, Angela Davis reviewed the years she’s personally committed to theorizing and dismantling the US incarceration system:

When an audience member asked Davis what can we do to bring about real change now, she warned against believing there is some magical solution, some secret formula that might bring us to some utopia. She pointed out that her work around prisons began in the 1960s, over forty years ago, and we are only now beginning to see results. She pointed out that Ida B. Wells’ anti-lynching campaign would only bear fruit after she was no longer alive to see it.” —Minkah Makalani, October 2, 2016

This moment is always the only one I have the ability to act in; here is the only place I meet the world beyond myself.

But peering back at all this time behind me is a way to remind myself that every current crisis and every current joy is part of a much, much larger, much, much longer unfolding story. Twelve years, 40 years, 238 years, 12,000 years, 200,000 years—all of these are spans that put my transitory life seconds in context.

Perhaps for some people a sense of scale evokes a sense of smallness and futility. For me, it inspires courage. My people, my species, has gone through extinction events and resisted traumas of all kinds; and here we are.

We can’t amend the choices of the distant or recent past, but we can choose and act anew in this moment, here.

It takes strength to work as Davis has, for years without reward and no guarantees of success. And it’s something that more of us will have to learn to practice ourselves, whatever our domains and no matter how hopeful and resilient we endeavor to be.

August 23, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Control and courage

On my way out of the office last Friday, I saw a single white wildflower growing out of a crack in the parking lot. It was nestled right in the corner between the level that the cars drive on and the sidewalk that people walk on.

It was about eight inches tall with Irish green leaves, and it was growing its heart out. I saw it, and it made me smile, and I said to myself, “I should take a picture of that.”

Then I got in the car, and forgot.

That little wildflower was alive. It wasn’t even in the ideal location for life of its type, but it had found itself a place in the world to spread a few roots, and it’s going to grow in that crack for as long as the sky will water it.

Beautiful pluck struggles to break through the cement in hyper-controlled environments. Environments where every metric is logged and every output organized can become environments where a little white wildflower will get cut down through the weekly Wednesday Weeding program.

Control and wildflowers don’t work well together: organizational efficiency doesn’t always support the unfolding of organisms. Yet without organisms, organizations ultimately collapse.

Control tells us that if we can just grip life and people more tightly, we can wring more out of them.

But instead it turns out that the more we move through the world with full, trusting hearts—that is, the more we choose courage—and the more we open up to our environments rather than becoming less and less sensitive to them, the more room we gain to experience life itself, those we share this life with, and the joy and beauty of growing our hearts out together.