Archive for May 21, 2008
Feel the Burn
Monday night I had the luck to have Nora and Mary to pass thru Atlanta and stay with us. I’ve been excited, nervous, and apprehensive about the bike tour. Being the procrastinator I tend to be, I think I was planning a way to not go at the last minute(Did you know that Nora?) . But with my train tix finally booked to NOLA(I booked it last night), I am on my way! So what about my training. Yes, the training! I have been taking a delicious cycling class for months now(toughening up my rear) and doing cardio but I have not been as hard core as some of the other Wanderlusties. I just got my bike for the tour on Saturday. Her name is Shug and I am stoked!
I’ve been riding my other bike around town. Nora and I biked to my job yesterday-7.3 miles- and it felt good. And though 7.3 is only a dent in what we will have to do- its one mile and one pedal at a time!
As I have been getting ready- I believe I will take on the feat of packing tonight, I have been thinking about my feelings of privilege and nervousness.
I feel so privileged to be making this trip. A) a privilege to be able to meet new folks, be out in the world exerting my body everyday, and connect with others in our shared human experience as healers and warriors. B) a privilege to have a job that will allow me to travel for this amount of time and values this kind of participation as valuable to building a movement for reproductive justice C) that I have the love and support from family and community that can allow me to follow my passion. D)and that I have my health and strength to be able to take on this giant task.
I also feel nervous. The history of the South is an ever constant reel that plays in mind. I worry about feeling and being safe in a part of the country where racism is manifested in active KKK chapters, the Jena 6, and the real often unheard stories of women of color who have been raped, forcibly sterilized, and who been locked up in alarming rates. I feel nervous about being one of a small number of women of color on the trip especially as we talk about reproductive justice(will folks think pro-choice is reproductive justice? will it be understood the importance of women of color coining the term and framework, will I be tokenized or my culture co-opted-” Can I touch your hair” or” You know that is so ghetto”).
And in my feeling of priveldge and nervousness is my overwhelming hopefulness in this process that I believe will be transformative. This voyage that can help us in listening to each other, being present, being an ally, stepping up, articulating when we are afraid, stepping back, and let’s us learn our bodies in a way that we are often disconnecting from.
I am hopeful that I will be on this trip with others who will value the intense conditions under which we are asking our bodies to function are the same ways in which we can push our hearts and minds. See you in NOLA!
With Shug and rj on my mind!
paris
Chicory and choosing your adventure
It’s Nora again, already. Now I sit in a small cafe in Bywater, a neighborhood in New Orleans, which everyone forgot to tell me is actually like another country. Driving across the long flat bridge over Lake Pontchartrain seems to have taken us to an entirely different climate, where life moves in slower swaying rhythms and everything is open to the air. We’re staying at my friend Amy’s house – Amy and I met last summer on Wanderlust 1, when I stayed with her in Newark, Delaware (say New-ARK and not NEW-ark and the locals will love you). I had found her on couchsurfing, and we ended up staying up talking until she had to leave for her job at the bakery. It turned out that we had mutual friends and we’ve stayed in touch over the last year. I, however, thought she’d moved to San Francisco, because last time we’d talked that had been her plan.
A few weeks ago on a Saturday morning meandering bike ride I ended up at McCarren park, and as I was walking by one of the farmer’s market booths a woman called out “Nora?” It turned out to be Amy’s old roommate, Margaret, who was working on a farm in upstate New York. She told me that Amy was actually living in New Orleans, and she’d be excited to hear I was coming through. A few short weeks later, and we’re here, our bed of yoga mats and sleeping bags laid on the wide, lacquered floorboards of her shotgun house. Last night we talked over dinner about what it means to live somewhere, and how it came to be that Amy ended up in New Orleans. It turned out that she had indeed been planning to move to San Francisco, or at least seriously considering ending up there. She drove through New Orleans on her way there, and one thing led to another led to another, a spare bedroom and exciting projects pulled her in and she decided to stay.
(I also think it must be hard to leave a place that is so mysteriously like another planet, but that might just be me).
We were talking about what it means to choose the places you live, and the relative merits of being intentional about where your home is vs. letting it happen to you more organically. One of the reasons I decided to go to grad school was that it gave me a really clear, concrete reason to be in New York, and I never had to worry about what I was going to do once I got there. And while I’m glad I did it, and I’m definitely glad to be in school and spending this time thinking and learning, I also know that it was indulging the scared, small parts of me that worry about finding meaning, making friends.
One of my favorite parts of last summer was traveling to towns where I knew literally no one, had never been before, and making connections, learning about how life moved and people related as they moved through their days. I was continually surprised by the places I fell in love with – Montana, for one, which is only actually surprising if you’ve never been to Montana, and Albany, and Baltimore. All places I had really only a fuzzy and indistinct idea of before I got there, and all places that surprised me with their charm. (Baltimore’s nickname is actually Charm City, so I shouldn’t have been that surprised, I guess.)
On the drive down here, I was also struck by how much you don’t get a sense of the country at all from driving through it on the Interstate. Most of the time that road is encased in a tunnel of green as a sound screen, and there’s no way to know what’s on the other side. The vision of the country I had from driving through it is so radically different of the vision I got from biking it that it’s basically like two different places.
We’ll try to bring you pictures and descriptions of not just the people we meet but also the places we pass through, the things that make Anniston different from Athens.
Today the PEP staff (Mary, Aimee, and I) are meeting with advocates and activists from New Orleans to talk about the results of our new research and learn about their work. Many of the riders are already on their way to New Orleans, 13 paths converging on New Orleans on Friday. By then, we’ll hopefully have brought some semblance of order to the utter chaos of the van.
