nancymthurston

September 26, 2013

Stop Asking Me

It was a small request—help care for a friend’s dog overnight. My response was huge. STOP ASKING ME TO DO THINGS. Not just my friend. Everyone!

This simple request felt like one more thing in the midst of too many demands on my time. I just wanted to be left alone.

In addition, recently I’ve received numerous requests for money. From friends. From projects/organizations I care deeply about. It feels like too much. I get overwhelmed and part of me shouts, “STOP ASKING ME.”

Ultimately, all I have to do is to say “Yes” to requests that are mine to do. Say “No” to the rest.

So why do I roar, “STOP ASKING ME”?

I feel bad when there is a need for the help in the form of time or money. I want these projects/organizations to thrive. It hurts my heart to know about so many needs that I can’t help take care of. I feel worthless when I do nothing.

Part of me also doesn’t like having my well-crafted, overly full days complicated by others. Though I’d never say that to anyone, it’s hard when I find out about another project or person’s need when I feel like I don’t even have time to figure out how to respond.

My inner roar doesn’t feel like it’s going to disappear any time soon. But it is exhausting and I’m looking for an alternative response.

I want to practice standing steady in a very busy, fast-moving world. See both sides of the truth—amazing things that are happening alongside heartbreaking inequity and important work under- or non-funded. In the midst of the paradox, I want to keep my heart open.

We need to keep asking each other for what we need. Sometimes the response will be “Yes.” Sometimes “No.” Sometimes screams. Sometimes gentle clarity.

It’s not easy to be alive. But it is fascinating …

September 16, 2013

The Eight-eyed Steam Girl is a Woman Now: My life as Myth

I was born an Eight-eyed Steam Girl. The fire of natural gas and oil shot through me from below; ancient waters poured down from above. The mixing was wild and chaotic. Fluid emotions and flaming passion combined to propel me down the tracks, rocking back and forth with my own rhythm. I could see where I was going even though I had no map in hand. A different sort of sight was required for my trip through life. And I had lots of sight—eight eyes. Not just the two typical face eyes but eyes of my heart, hands, feet and one right in the middle of my forehead.

Other folks thought all that sight and steam was too much in one little girl. My “extra” eyeballs were lassoed and tucked out of sight. The “unsightly” steam was controlled by a careful wrapping of my entire body with a beautiful skein of yarn, stopping up all of the “unsightly” eruptions of steam.

Luckily, I was a smart girl. I learned how to navigate with two eyes and my rational, logical mind, all propelled by the limited amount of steam that escaped around my full body wrapping.

Until now.

It’s time for a change. My rhythm has long been strong and powerful, but limping. Not connected to the heart of myself. Trying hard to adapt to the demanding gallop of the culture around me. I wanted to find the real me once again.

I released my eyeballs from their hiding spot and laid the beautiful yarn unwrapped from around my body in a knitting basket. Part of me danced with delight. But my two, overused eyeballs and my brain, so long in charge, screamed and shouted in fear. “Don’t go. You are throwing away the best ways to navigate through life. You’ll never be able to keep everything straight, get anything done, be efficient again.”

Nonsense. But sometimes, too many sometimes, I still believe this fearful voice. Chaos is harder to navigate than tried and true to-do lists. What would happen in my life, I wondered, if too many things fell through the cracks?

For over fifty years I’d kept my inner lid tightly closed so I could adjust to the world. It was time now to quit pretending I was someone else.

In my wrapped up days, I’d over accommodated, tried to be the woman others needed me to be, nice and supportive-like. It was EXHAUSTING. I’d been trying to fuel my life with limited sight and truncated energy.

Now is the time. I was born an Eight-eyed Steam Girl, and now I’m older. Coming home to myself. Learning new songs and dances.

Wild, wise and a little crazy, I’ll find my own way to dance with steam, see every which way and sing with all parts of myself.

In the middle of writing Big Topics at Midnight, I played with telling my life story as a myth. Instantly, I had the image of an Eight-eyed Steam Girl in her Little Red Boat. I told her story from birth until high school. As I struggled to find a way to step into a more intuitive, Spirit-guided way of shepherding my book for this second year, I returned to the myth to see how my story would look right now, as I moved toward my 60^th birthday.

For a more extensive peek into my personal myth, see Big Topics at Midnight, pages 306-308.

September 12, 2013

A Different Kind of Patriot

“On September 11, 2001, Dad began his three-week walk toward death. In life, Dad was in charge. But when his crisis hit, he began to let go. He was transformed by the process, and found a new way to live his dying.

On the morning Dad found out he was dying, hijacked planes crashed into buildings that epitomized US economic, military and governmental power. The nation responded with talk of war and patriotic pride rather than grief and introspection. With that choice, the violence continued.”*

This September, I hear the beating of the war drums yet again. In order to move forward, I first need to look back to my lifetime of wars/CIA violence/military action, beginning in 1954:

Guatemala 1953-1990s

Middle East 1956-58

Indonesia 1957-58

British Gulana/Guyana 1953-64

Vietnam 1950-73

Cambodia 1955-75

Congo/Zaire 1960-65

Brazil 1961-64

Dominican Republic 1963-66

Cuba 1959-present

Indonesia 1965

Laos 1971-73

Chile, 1964-73

Greece 1964-74

East Timor, 1975-99

Nicaragua 1978-89

Grenada 1979-84

Libya 1981-89

Grenada 1983-84

Panama 1989-90

Iraq 1990s

Kuwait 1991, 96

Afghanistan 1979-92

El Salvador 1980-92

Haiti 1987-95

Iran and Kuwait 1991

Somalia 1992-94

Yugoslavia 1999

Iraq 1991, 1998, 2003-2011

Afghanistan 2001-present

Pakistan 2005-06

This doesn’t include the violence of our government and citizens against other citizens based on race, class, gender, gender-identity, nationality, religion…

Far too often, these wars didn’t resolve the root issues, resulted in extensive civilian and military deaths and trauma, and resulted in the diversion of money and human energy from community and people centered needs.

Dad’s choice of surrender to his grief and his clear personal introspection led to Life, even in his death. I pray that one day soon my country will begin to make alternative, powerful choices other continuing to use violence to deal with violence.

This long history of marching to war again and again is one part of our national story. The other part includes profound acts of generosity and compassion done by Americans and the US.

It is a wide paradox to hold.

The patriots I want to honor on “Patriot Day” are those who are fighting for justice and equity—within themselves, in their neighborhoods, in our nation and around the world. These patriots are many and their work is varied.

To each and every one of you, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

*Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself (Portland: Rosegate Press, 2012) page 145.

Khara Scott-Bey’s illustration in Big Topics at Midnight is from the chapter that speaks to Dad’s dying from lung cancer as our country begin its long march to war.

September 2, 2013

What Would Grandma Say about This?

I am delighted that death didn’t stop my grandmothers from telling me about their lives. Fact and intuition, family stories and playful imagination came together for me as I wrote Big Topics at Midnight. In this fifth YouTube video, I explore how I gained a deeper understand of my roots and when I turned an ear to generations long past.

No special training was required. Just a willingness to set aside my skeptical mind and listen with an open heart. You too can tap into the wisdom of your past, to uncover both the mistakes and marvels of your family history, and to see your life as connected to generations yet to come.

My grandmothers Ann Cahoon Mathys and Ruth Owen Tipps both both had their photographs taken in the same position sitting on a rock. Ann was teaching in California and Ruth was living in Texas at the time. They wanted to give you a glimpse of their love of dance (Ann) and story-telling (Ruth) here. I love sharing a website with family writings and photographs across the generations.

For more videos poke around my website or visit my YouTube Channel.

August 29, 2013

“What is my emotional inheritance?”

That question jumped off the page in Colette Winlock’s book Undoing Crazy.* Earlier in the novel, when “Mama” spoke about her childhood in Love, Texas in the 1930s, I was thrown back into my memories growing up in West Texas in the 1950s and 1960s.

What was the emotional inheritance passed down to me from generations of my white-skinned family living in North Carolina, Tennessee then Texas?

I can still hear Mom’s voice telling me that emotions aren’t trustworthy. “Don’t let emotions detract you from the work to be done.” “Emotions have no place in the Church.” “Responsibility is more important than how you feel.”

I was taught to think critically. To be curious. To study. And yet, we were discouraged from thinking, or noticing, the Big Topics like racism, sexism or classism.

My grandfather O.R. Tipps, an attorney, was direct in a letter he wrote to his daughter, my mother, in 1945—“Social reformers all try to make people equal. They can’t do it, and by trying, they impede the best ones and don’t help the weak ones. However, they usually get worked up into a lather in trying to get some law, or some tradition, or some precedent changed to make each and every person exactly equal.”

What laws, traditions or precedents did he mean? Redlining? Segregation? Black codes? Jim Crow? Lynching?

How much was my family’s emotional inheritance stunted in the clash between our valuing of intellectual analysis of every topic except the big public ones?

Part of us had to go to sleep to live in the face of such a stark contradiction. We were trained not to notice anything that didn’t fit into the official, white-skinned, USA self-image of rock-solid values of democracy and justice for all.

My family was politically moderate, Christian and thoughtful. I never heard my parents make a racist statement or treat individuals disrespectfully based on the color of their skin.

Yet, in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called my family to task: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice…Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”

My family’s silence spoke volumes, and perpetuated injustice.

The cost of our sleep was profound.

Believing so deeply in law-and-order yet averting our eyes to injustice (or feeling bad, but doing nothing) stunted our emotional inheritance. It is impossible to be profoundly asleep in one area of our lives and be vibrantly alive in the rest of life.

For me personally, I still struggle to notice, then pay attention, to my own emotions. But the cost to my nation is far more serious. How else can we explain our deep sleep to the reality of inequity, injustice and environmental destruction all around us?

I want to leave a different emotional legacy to generations yet to come.

* Colette Winlock. Undoing Crazy (Oakland: Oaktown Press, 2013), 293.

August 27, 2013

Transgender

For most of my life “transgender” wasn’t part of my vocabulary. I never knew there were any options other than male and female, congruency in body and spirit.

This week Chelsea Manning brought transgender to the front-page news. It is clear from the reactions that many others also assumed that gender identity was cut and dry—the genitalia you were born with determined whether you were male or female.

It’s not that simple. Being asleep to this reality, however, doesn’t make the reality “strange” or “wrong.”

Transgender is a relatively new term (though not a new experience). Trans Basics gives three definitions: “someone who doesn’t fit within society’s standards of how a woman or a man is supposed to look or act,” someone who was assigned a gender at birth “but later realizes that label doesn’t accurately reflect who they feel they are inside,” or someone who feels like “they’re in between those two options; both male and female; or outside the two-gender system, entirely, neither male nor female, outside of the strict division of male and female.”

Even believing that all babies are physically born either male or female is untrue; it is estimated that 1 in 2000 babies have ambiguous genitalia. The societal stigma of parents not being able to answer the critical question, “Is it a boy or a girl?” is so powerful that typically the doctor will decide the baby’s gender and perform “corrective” surgery. As the child (most often “reassigned” a female) grows up, she/he may, or may not, agree with the doctor’s choice.

Dr. Milton Diamond, professor of neurology and intersex, said, “Nature loves variety. Unfortunately, society hates it.”

Yet even if genitalia are not ambiguous, they don’t always align with an individual’s inner experience of being male, female or gender non-conforming. Those who experience a disconnect between their physical gender and their inner-knowing gender have a challenging choice before them.

Live a lie about an important aspect of life.

Or live what is true, and face opposition, stigma and daily challenges. Simple things become complicated. Public bathrooms. Forms with binary gender boxes. Personal pronouns. Name change. Greater possibility of ridicule and violence.

Chelsea Manning. She.

As a nation, we can react from our (often) non-existent personal experience and societal-affirmed assumptions about being trans and speak from ignorance, fear or prejudice. Or we can stop. Listen. Seek out information. Read about the experience of people who know what it is like to live outside our culture’s rigid belief that people are born either male or female. Allow the boundaries of “normal” to expand to include all of nature’s variety.

I believe that a society thrives when we can each bring forth the truth about ourselves. Chelsea Manning just spoke clearly, publicly. It won’t make her life any easier (despite what too many newspapers speculate), yet it will make her future more honest.

August 21, 2013

When Life Throws You a Tornado

I awoke startled from a dream. A house was flying through the air, beginning to come apart amid an iron, ironing board, car, flip-flops and furniture heading in every direction.

What is needed for this time when everything seems to be flying off its hinges or soaring up from tried and true foundations? Lord only knows where it will all land.

The invitation I hear in the middle of this chaos is to let it all go. Don’t look for landing spots. And, hardest of all, don’t be afraid.

I am flying through the air myself. Am I the iron—desperately wanting to remove some wrinkles? Am I driving the car that has left the road behind?

Every time I wake up during a sleepless night, I am off and flying in my thoughts and fears. No landing in sight.

When life throws me a tornado, I need to learn to fly—or swirl or release.

The rest is up in the air.

August 16, 2013

Memoir for Social Change: Memoir #5

It is easier for me to develop a theory about racism than it is to keep bringing my behavior into alignment with my values even as my understanding grows about race in my own head and in the world around me.

Last March, Donna Britt (author of Brothers (and me)) and I brought our memoirs to Washington, DC’s Busboys and Poets monthly A Continuing Talk On Race gathering. The question posed to the room full of people was, “ How does telling our personal ‘race stories’ advance a community discussion?”

One of my significant awakenings about race happened when Cynthia Renfro told a story about her mother, Pat, set in 1965 in Dallas, Texas. Hearing about Pat’s encounter with a “White’s Only” sign in a Laundromat jumbled all I had previously believed was true about my home state as a Texas 5^th grader in 1965. I’d never noticed any signs. Where they there, but I hadn’t notice? What else hadn’t I seen?

I’d rarely thought about race as a child, nor noticed signs of inequality.

When I made that comment at Busboys and Poets, Donna reported that she’d been conscious about race every day of her life. Clearly my experience as a white girl was different than the experiences of Donna, Pat and Cynthia as black girls/women.

For all of my teen and adult life, I have held enlightened, progressive beliefs about skin color and justice. That is good. But that was only a first step.

Woven into the birthing of this nation, racism is entrenched within national values, institutions, education, religion and passed on to us from the moment we were born. Our official versions of history are white-washed. It has been easy for white people like me to make assumptions about how race has influenced life in this country based on our own experience and education. Unfortunately, my opinions have often been wrong and led to division rather than equity and justice.

It all comes back to personal stories. Looking again at what I noticed and didn’t notice as a child. Exploring a diversity of historical stories to gain a broader, and more accurate, understanding of history. Noticing those quiet murmurings inside my head, or those exaggerated reactions that seem to come from left field, to see where and how racism has lodged in my body despite my more enlightened values. And listening closely to people with all colors of skin, trying to understand what life has been like for each of us.

We are all complex and paradoxical. Compassion is needed as we uncover the diversity of stories within ourselves and our culture.

The divisions that still scar our world today are too serious for trivial navel gazing. Sharing story, however, isn’t trivial. Awakening to, then transparently sharing, the truth of our lives and experiences is critical to our joint effort of building a more equitable world.

What stories are you willing to share now that will be a gift to those born seven generations in the future?

This is the final in the blog series exploring the diversity of memoirs held in Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class Gender and Herself.

August 6, 2013

What It Means to be White

What is it like for me to have white skin in our world today?

The only time I thought about skin color as a young girl was in the middle of an art project. As a young artist who finally learned that people don’t have purple or green skin, I always looked for the “flesh” colored crayon.
Most of my life has been lived primarily surrounded by other white Americans. This long string of racially homogeneous neighborhoods and social circles kept me blind to the racism inherent in the opportunities and experiences I’d learned to take for granted.

I recently read about the history of whites in Hawaii. It was filled in greed, violence, theft and racism against all non-white peoples, including the native Hawaiians. It is a story that has been repeated in Haiti, Central America and Africa. This is not just history, it is happening today.

Looking at the hard truths of my own story as a white woman is the subject of my latest YouTube video. I have to stand in the paradox of both horrors and generosity of white people and white culture in order to discover what it means to me, personally, to be a white woman. Noticing and diving deeply into my own whiteness has helped me gain perspective on my privilege, our history and our universal challenges as we move forward toward justice.

Are you ready to look at your own life, including the implications of your skin color, and see yourself in a bigger context of truth?

July 30, 2013

I Must Speak: A Time to Break Silence #2

In the process of updating my blogs’ categories and tags, I noticed that I omitted one posting from my series on A Time to Break Silence. And not just a random one, but my most personal blog about the topic. Mistake? Freudian blip? What should I do–just ignore it, add it in to part #3 or send it out now even though it is out of sequence? Obviously, I decided on the latter. Life isn’t always neat and in the right order…

It is terrifying to speak knowing that my vision is limited. I don’t want to appear stupid or insensitive or disrespectful.

Sometime I blurt things out. Come on too strong. Get emotional. Exaggerate.

Big emotions scare me. I resonate with Dr. King:

“… some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night

have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony,

but we must speak.

We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision,

but we must speak.”

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.*

“The calling to speak is often a vocation of agony” for me. Yet I was called to write a book about the hot topics of race, class and gender. I know much more about myself and the world around me than I did years ago. Yet, I still have limited vision.

These fears that bang around inside of me had me quiet for far too long. Since I care about our world, quiet is a luxury I can no longer afford. The times call for us all to step into the fullness of our sight and to speak our dreams and visions of situations where actions and beliefs are out of alignment with that dream.

The challenge goes beyond merely knowing that I must speak what is true for me. I must also take responsibility for what I say and how I say it. Venting my frustration or anger may be needed in preparation for speaking—taking the time to process with a close friend as I work toward my own clarity, for example—but it rarely helps move a conversation forward to speak from my initial emotional reaction.

I need to remember what I know. About myself. About the bigger partnership I seek with individuals and with generations to follow me. About the spirit at the heart of the other, even people with whom I disagree. I want my words to be in line with my own spirit and my vision for myself and the world around me.

What does it mean for me to be in true partnership with myself, with others, with my nation, with generations now and those to come? What is my responsibility to be in conversation, to stop ancient patterns of disrespect or assumptions or behaviors that are part of the power dynamic or beliefs that have done so much damage over the generations?

Now is a time to break silence. Not in the abstract, but daily, speaking what is true for me, always remembering the deeper love that undergirds my life’s work.

Second in a series honoring *Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Beyond Vietnam–A Time to Break Silence, Delivered April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City. The next in the series is titled “Race, Class and Violence.”