Some photos from local walks

River walk in Claudy, early morning



Forest walk in Loughermore, earlyish morning




Warrenpoint and Carlingford Lough from Cloch Mór, Rostrevor

Virginia Tech

If someone walks into a room with a gun and shoots people, they do so because somehow it makes sense to them to do so. It seemed like an appropriate thing to do for that person at that time in that place. It's important for me to understand how such things manage to make sense to that person, when they seem to make so little sense to others. It is important for me to understand the kind of journey that brings you to the place where you do something like that. There but for the grace of circumstance go I.

What are you waiting for?

"Education, if it is to be worthy of its true meaning, can, should, and must be at the forefront of resistance to the routine dehumanization of our whole industrialized mass culture. That is possible. I have done it. So have others. But it is rare. Too many teachers, like too many students, too many workers at too many war manufacturing plants, too many writers, too many politicians, too many people who could be human beings but who have been trained by their schooling and by their work and by their pursuit of money and their pursuit of acceptance and by their very real fear of being who they are step away from this responsibility, and in so doing lead themselves and those around them ever farther from their hearts, and lead us all ever closer to the personal and planetary annihilation that is the looming end point of industrial civilization.

"If one of the most unforgivable sins is to lead people away from themselves, we must not forgive the processes of industrial education.

"There is, however, an alternative. Or rather, there are as many alternatives as there are people, and most especially as there are people engaged in active, thoughful relationships with their communities, which includes their living landbases, the land where they live, the land that supports and nourishes them.

"I've heard it said that within our deathly culture, the most revolutionary thing anyone can do is follow one's heart. I would add that once you've begun to do that - to follow your own heart - the most moral and revolutionary thing you can do is help others find their hearts, to find themselves. It's much easier than it seems.

"Time is short. It's short for our planet - the planet that is our home - that is being killed while we stand by. And it is even shorter for all of those students whose lives are slipping away from them with every awful tick of the clock on the classroom wall.

"There is much work to be done. What are you waiting for? It's time to begin."

Derrick Jensen, Walking on Water (2004).

Front page update

Just a note to say that the front page of the http://craftinggentleness.org/ site has been reworked quite considerably.

Craftivism!

I just came across a wonderfully relevant website: http://www.craftivism.com/about.html

There seem to be a lot of people into 'craftivism', using crafting to think about how they position themselves in relation to empowerment and social change and activism. I think we're having a very similar conversation so I'll contact Betsy who runs it and start a conversation ... :)

Crafting bibliography update

There's now a comprehensive list of English language books and articles on 'crafting' at:

http://www.craftinggentleness.org/crafting.html

Feminist Reprise

I just came across the following site which has links to some really interesting feminist texts:

http://www.feminist-reprise.org/archive.html

I read feminist texts by re-reading terms like "Masculine Imperative", "Masculinist oppression", or "patriarchy" as if they referred to what I think of as the expectation that uncertainty can be or should be eliminated. I tend to read these texts, then, as critiques of "enclosing" dynamics; critiques of unhelpful relationship; critiques of ways of making sense of experience and each other that lead us towards fear, hate, oppression, domination, coercion, and violence, and, for me, away from the deeply powerful and personal politics of gentleness.

The texts on this site are particularly interesting as challenges to seek a robust gentleness, not a passive gentleness, not a weak gentleness, challenges to find ways to think about a politics of gentleness that do not fall back into the trap of condemning people or ourselves to a nice, polite, subservience under cover of kindness. These articles challenge me to continue to seek a gentleness that allows me to work for a transparent critique of whatever contributes to the emergence and perpetuation of fear, hate, oppression, domination, coercion, and violence. Including a discerning critique of myself, my thinking, my doing, and my relationships, when appropriate.

An excerpt from an excerpt on the site ... from Joanna Russ' Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts (The Crossing Press, 1985)

Power and Helplessness in the Women's Movement

A strong woman is a woman in whose head
a voice is repeating, i told you so,
ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,
ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,
why aren't you feminine, why aren't
you soft, why aren't you quiet, why
aren't you dead?

--Marge Piercy, "For Strong Women" from The Moon Is Always Female (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1980)

"Really good women, really "nice" women, really sisterly women, are dead women.

Well, no. Nobody literally expects millions of us to drop down ker-flop clutching flowers to our bosoms like Elaine the Lily Maid of Astolat, and yet I wonder. Women are supposed to make other people feel good, to fill others' needs without having any of our own-this is the great Feminine Imperative. Such self-suppression amounts to the death of the self. Why demand such an impossibility?

All oppressed people must be controlled. Since open force and economic coercion are practical only part of the time, ideology--that is, internalized oppression, the voice in the head--is brought in to fill the gap. When people discover their own power, governments tremble. Therefore, in addition to all the other things that are done to control people, their own strength must be made taboo to them. Vast numbers of men can be allowed to experience some power as long as they expend their power against other men and against women--a desirable state of affairs since it keeps men (and men and women) from cooperating, which would be a grave menace to the powers that be. Therefore the Masculine Imperative is less severe than the Feminine one.

The Masculine Imperative means that men avoid the threat of failure, inadequacy, and powerlessness --omnipresent in a society built on competition and private property--by existing against others.

But the Feminine Imperative allows of no self-help at all. We exist for others.

But women are also terrified by female strength, women judge success in women to be the worst sin, women force women to be "unselfish," women would rather be dead than strong, rather helpless than happy.

Feminist women, too.

If you've been forbidden the use of your own power for your own self, you can give up your power or you can give up your self. If you're effective, you must be so for others but never for yourself (that would be "selfish"). If you're allowed to feel and express needs, you must be powerless to do anything about them and can only wait for someone else--a man, an institution, a strong woman--to do it for you.

That is, you can be either a Magic Momma or a Trembling Sister."

http://www.feminist-reprise.org/docs/russmm.htm

Specificity is everything

"If we are ever to remember what it is to be human beings, and if we are ever to hope to begin to live sustainably in place (which is the only way to live sustainably), we will have to remember that specificity is everything. It's the only thing we've got. In this moment I'm not abstractly writing: I'm writing these specific words on this specific piece of paper using this specific pen, lying on this specific bed next to this specific cat. There is nothing apart from the particular. Now, I can certainly generate abstract notions of writing or humanity or cities or nature or the world, but they're not real. What is real is immediate, present, particular, specific. That's true in life. It's true in writing. And writing is as good a place to start as any."

Derrick Jensen, Walking on Water (2004, p.60)

Interview with Dar Williams

I've just posted an interview with singer and songwriter Dar Williams in the new Gentle Hearts section.

caring, modesty, gentleness

"The fact that much of [craft] is done for pleasure, for love and not for competition, exhibition or sale, is part of its strength and value. But I also believe it is important that such work should be seen by a wide audience. The reasons for this are, first, because it provides evidence of women’s culture and history, evidence which can mean stimulus and encouragement for craftworkers. Secondly, craftwork’s existence, and the lives of women who make it, provide a challenge to the established notions of ‘great art’ and ‘great artist’. (It has long been a popular belief that ‘art’ is produced by ‘great’ individuals in special circumstances.) Thirdly, it is important to show housewives’ craftwork because it brings to the fore those values which have been missing from the cultural scene – caring, modesty, gentleness. There are not necessarily feminine characteristics, but they have, through cultural association, been most successfully represented by women. Finally, communicating through craft can give the woman tied to the home a voice outside to penetrate and influence the dominant sphere of cultural exchange. Only the housewife can give an authentic account of her life, work and material conditions. Unless we speak out, and in any form available to us, we can never hope to gain access to the means of owning and controlling the institutions of power that circumscribe and determine our lives as housewives" (Pen Dalton, 36).

Pen Dalton. 1987. "Housewives, Leisure Crafts and Ideology: De-skilling in consumer craft." in Women and Craft. Edited by Gillian Elinor, Su Richardson, Sue Scott, Angharad Thomas, and Kate Walker. Pp. 31-36. London: Virago.

Webpage Updates

A soundfile of the talk I gave in Cork a while ago is now available on the Crafting Gentleness site along with a bibliography.

I've put up an updated reading list for the reading gentleness section.

I've started putting some stuff in the helpful thinking section.

Cassie

Finally, I've managed to get a photo of my new housemate Cassie. We went for a walk on Sunday morning and I put my back out in an attempt to keep her from nibbling a small, quivering lump of mini-dog , so, for the moment, instead of going for walks we play fetch every morning in the garden. Which is more fun than a walk and she gets to run a bit :)

Eyes forward, gentle heart

I found myself thinking last night that I wasn't sure if I had enough courage to keep going with something that I have expended untold energy on over the last number of years. Then I caught myself on, thinking that courage isn't helpfully thought of as a resource that I deplete, but an attitude I work at; you can't deplete an attitude - you can hone it, recalibrate it, craft it, work at it ... And effort doesn't guarantee expected outcomes or even deserve my aspirations. The effort I make is my own business. The emotional work I do, if I do it at all, garners its reward in the living of it. Eyes forward, gentle heart.

Everything is workable

"When we realize that the path is the goal, there's a sense of workability. Everything that occurs in our confused mind we can regard as the path. Everything is workable."

Pema Chodron, Comfortable With Uncertainty (2002)

I write for ...

I write for my own kind
I do not pitch my voice
that every phrase be heard
by those who have no choice:
their quality of mind
must be withdrawn and still,
as moth that answers moth
across a roaring hill.

John Hewitt (1907-1987)

Clearing Clutter

I've been getting into clearing clutter. Roughly 10 kilos has been reused/recycled and passed on. Probably about 10 more to go.

I've been enjoying the 'psychology' of letting go. Getting rid of:
- Clothes that don't fit means accepting my body shape.
- Stupit trinkets that someone gave me, means admitting that a trinket doesn't represent their love for me.
- Stuff from friends long gone doesn't means admitting I can't keep them with me.
- Projects I never finished, means admitting they are not going to get finished.

and so forth. Clearing clutter is about getting real honest!!!

However, the inner wrestling that I do to get stuff out the door - but i might need it (the universe is plentiful and I receive everything I need) but It's expensive (then someone who needs it will sell it and get the money they need)....

Man when I open that hatch on the charity bin and put that stuff in and then walk back to my car unencumbered it's like taking a great big psychological dump!!! (can I say that here? *g*)

And since I"ve been doing it all sorts of lovely synchronicities have reappeared in my life, because there's space now.

Soooz