Archive for June, 2008
Thinking about Charleston, sitting by the sea
Monday morning, and we’re bringing you another group blog from an alligator infested swampland campground in coastal South Carolina. As we move up the coast, heading North, we wanted to share with you our thoughts and reflections on the discussions we had with local activists in Charleston, South Carolina.
Hello, Vanessa Renee here. During the meeting yesterday we broke into small discussion groups of several riders and one or two Charlestonians in order to allow us to better understand how the reproductive justice movement is shaping and affecting community in South Carolina according to the experiences and perspectives of individuals. I had a chance to be a part of discussion about race, gender, socioeconomic politics, and student activism on campus with Allison, the head of the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the College of Charleston. Because of my involvement with feminist student groups at Indiana University, I was most curious to know about how students are organizing on campus and how university and community organizations interact with and support those groups. I was surprised to learn that the two feminist groups on campus are both affiliates of national organizations and that the only independent group engaged with feminist and reproductive justice issues that Allison knew of was community based. Both campus based groups are struggling to stay active but have put together what sounds like creative and affective initiatives to bring issues of women’s health and health rights to the attention of students. Last year, one of the groups made a huge blue statue of the number 72 and moved it around to different locations on campus in order to promote the availability of the emergency contraception pill or “EC”, a form of birth control most affective when taken within the first 72 hours after sex. The community based group is engaged in direct action activism, participating in critical mass bike rides through Charleston in support of environmental and cyclist rights and celebrating menustration by dressing in red and ending the ride with a “period party”. Learning about the concerns and actions of other student groups through Allison’s stories helped me feel a strong connection to young feminist activists hundreds of miles away from where I am most engaged in activism and calls in me a strong desire to connect personally with these young women and men in order to intensify the effects of the shared work with which we are all engaged.
Shelby here, writing after my first full day of riding and right before the first “long” ride – 60 miles to the next camp. My first Wanderlust activity was the meeting in Charleston, which was inspiring and alarming at the same time. Being from Texas, I know that there are both terrifying and unbelievable challenges to access to reproductive health care and also amazing people who stand up for those rights in the face of danger and censorship. The seven people who came to the meeting are those type – the type to play an accordion while escorting so women don’t have to hear themselves called murderers, the type to stand up to local religious zealots and let them know women’s bodies aren’t theirs to own. Very little time to write now, but check out my blog, www.shelbyknox.blogspot.com, for a full post on Charleston!
Heather Ault here! The other Wanderlust Heather finished the trip in Charlston so I’ll be the only Heather posting from here on out. A challenge I talked with activists is how to involve more young people in the movement. This question was posed by a Noel, a yoga studio owner and her husband in their early 40s, and was echoed by others in cities we passed through. For the most part, our group of 12 is generally the youngest in the conversation with most locals in their middle adult years into their late 70s. While this in inspiring in itself, it does speak to the disproportionate representation of young women. We talked about the apathy on college campuses around activism and politics and the right to a legal abortion taken for granted by younger women. However, perhaps this is an opportunity to ask why? What are the issues young people care most about regarding their sexuality and reproduction? I, myself, am 36 years old and certainly can’t answer that question. This speaks to why I’m on this wanderlusting trip in many ways. I don’t claim to have that answer either and want to be the best ally I can to concerns and problems younger generations face in these days of abstinence only education, STDs on the rise, and continued violence against women in our world.
Becky again! I helped to facilitate the meeting in Charleston, which just means I asked questions to get us started and told people to break into groups. In my small group, we spoke with Brenda and her husband and played with their cute baby. Brenda is completely passionate about reproductive rights, and as a native of California, she experienced culture shock in moving to SC. She said that in California she’d been complacent and believed women’s rights were secure, but in SC she was appalled at the conservative religious stronghold on the community and the schools. She’s worried about raising her son in an environment that isn’t respectful of women. Brenda is searching for a way to get more involved in progressive work in Charleston so that she can find others who want to advance women’s issues. I found this young family to be very inspiring. Their determination to be a minority voice in the face of much opposition is something to take home with me. Thanks, Brenda!!
Kathleen here. Our Charleston meeting was very interesting. Unlike most of our other meetings where there are usually only women in attendance, at this meeting the women brought their spouses. It was interesting to hear the perspectives of the couples and their forms of activism in such a conservative community. I had the great opportunity to hear the stories of one couple who moved from New Jersey to Charleston to start a yoga studio. Through this couple I learned that there are very few vocal individuals in this community, and the majority of them are not natives of Charleston, but people who have relocated from other parts of the country.
Mel here, finally! Charleston’s meeting seemed to me a nexus of connection between different worlds. For example, our Wanderlust group itself ranges in age from 20-50, and the communities of each of our riders also exemplify a wide range of values. As someone living in the notoriously liberal Bay Area, I do have to admit that while I told myself again and again how different the rest of the United States is, it was still a shock to hear some of the stories in Charleston. One story that Brenda told especially surprised me, about how people in the Charleston pro-choice community planned a very informal discussion that was passed along by word of mouth to just a few well-known people in the progressive Charleston community. Even with such a small, basically secret gathering at someone’s home, there arrived two protesters from the pro-life movement, plus a spy who came to sit in on the meeting. What I found chilling about this was the idea of people policing their own community in order to forcefully maintain a specific religious and political structure. To not even feel safe having a discussion with close friends because other community members will tell you it’s wrong by protesting and spying at your home- that’s a very difficult situation to struggle against. Even though I haven’t been on other meetings, I’ve been hearing that this is what comes up again and again: stories of isolation. On the other hand, the fact that families like Brenda’s were at the Charleston meeting deeply inspired me. I’m so impressed by their bravery in strongly living their lives there, and choosing to raise a beautiful son there, despite all the daily intolerances they face.
And now Nora, basking in the morning breeze on the wide front porch of the Grapefull Sisters Winery, where we spent the night. Charleston now seems like a very long time ago, so it’s interesting to think about the things that have stayed with me from our conversations. I talked with Allison, the Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at the college of Charleston, and I was struck by the stories she told about the women who take her Intro to Women’s Studies classes and how little they know about their bodies. I always think it’s interesting how obsessed women are with the outsides of their bodies- their skin and hair and breath and lips and clothes – but how very little we think about, or know about, our bodies themselves. One of the reasons that traveling by bicycle is so powerful, for me, is that it puts me in deep conversation with my muscles, my digestion, my internal organs. What would it be like, I wonder, if women worried as much about their insides as they do about their outsides?
Who we are
Erin O tip tapping
So yes, I’ll more than agree it’s been an intense week. I decided yesterday morning to take a three day break from the tour and am currently in Asheville, NC (with Megumi). I’m giving myself over to 400 count sheets while recollecting My beliefs about what it means to be an ally in this work. Holy! the power of living in community. Riding away from the group yesterday via greyhound bus, I became aware that my spine and internal clock felt like my own again. It had been a while.
As Nora mentioned on Sunday, we Wanderlusties have moved through mad amounts of resistance and excitement about dialoguing on white identity. Realizing that (as womyn with parts that still exist independent of this experience) we sit at different intersections on the road to understanding what it means to be complicit in maintaining oppressions has been a big part of this tour. Yes, this is a HUGE consciousness to carry when traveling as a unit, by bike, for 1700 miles across an entire section of this cuntree. We own and are inherently owned simultaneously.
I have engaged in many group and individual discussions focused on current tour dynamics over the last six days. Again, I see that we understand how our identities inform and are informed by the system surrounding race in SUCH extremely different ways. Some of us speak about respect and being treated as/treating each other as equals. Others speak of how white men control our bodies, how we relate to our own bodies and the bodies of others in the context of this oppression. I wince at underlying notions (some if not most I guess internally go unobserved) of entitlement. “I’m a good person, I too should be recognized as such.” This brings us back to a place of personalizing oppressions that distract our attention from racist and misogynist systems. It brings many of us , as white womyn, back to the question of how to hold our own white privilege.
I sit with the discomfort that comes moment after moment knowing I hold so many unearned advantages that affect the lives of others who I love deeply. I stepped away from the tour to look at my whiteness, to support a fellow rider who felt triggered, and find my own time. I’ll be back wednesday- willing to start reapplying that white chammy butter on my saddle sores to get me through this ride.
Reflections, orientations and revelations
It’s Nora, and I write to you this morning with a heavy heart, a heart that has been deeply moved by all I can not change, a heart that has been deeply engaged. It is Sunday morning, in Charleston, and as we welcome Shelby, Mel, and Stacey to the trip we say goodbye to Heather, Megumi, and Megan. We haven’t updated for a few days, and part of it is because it’s difficult to know how much of our struggles to relate in this vastly public and impersonal space. I worry that we will be misinterpreted, judged, or worst of all discounted. But I realize, and this past week has helped me do so, that I am only in charge of myself, and can only put intentions to the world, not will them into being.
I knew, when we started this trip, that it was going to be an intense experience, and that by committing to explore reproductive justice we were also committing to have hard conversations with ourselves about how we each, as individuals, are located within that movement. I struggled with what it meant as a white woman to be promoting a framework that was created by women of color, struggled with whether or not I was co-opting someone else’s struggle to further my own agenda. That continues to be one of my struggles, but I know that for me, reproductive justice is not a convenient and politically attractive tool to promote the appearance of progressivism or diversity. It is, instead, the only thing that allows me to think about the ways in which the struggles and challenges and strengths of communities across the country are interconnected.
I wrote often last year about my realizations that it was not the failure of systems (political, educational, social) that led to injustice, but that the systems were working precisely as their makers intended – that there was, indeed, a group of powerful people with an interest in preserving the status quo who sought to maintain systems that privileged themselves and people like them while oppressing others. I saw it in South Dakota, on the Yankton Sioux reservation, where IHS coerces women into contraceptive methods and refuses to provide abortions, and I saw it in Albany, where midwives practice underground, like criminals. I saw it in the faces of all the people I met who were committed to creating systems that empowered women to make their own decisions about their lives, in the stories they told me of frustration and resistance from the systems they worked within. And it committed me, above all, to the reproductive justice framework as literally the ONLY framework that allowed me to think about the ways in which all of the struggles I saw are interconnected, and imagine a world where there is true and full reproductive autonomy.
Now, we are halfway through Wanderlust 2, and we have been engaged in a deep and powerful conversation about the ways in which this trip and our group are complicit in, or resistant to, the status quo that exists in the outside world. We have struggled with what it means to be a group of mostly white women traveling through the country talking about reproductive justice. We have struggled with how to talk about racism, privilege, and the unspoken assumptions that each of us brings to the group and to our understanding of these issues. We are all in radically different places personally and politically, and we have struggled with how to be integrated as a group without making those differences invisible. And for at least one of us, we have failed to create such a group or a space, so she is leaving to create her own reality and find her own truth. There are at least 14 different ways to tell this story, so I bring you, here, at least some of them, and ask that you read with compassion, and know that you are reading about one particular point in this process of discovery and struggle, and what we write today may be radically different than what we’d write tomorrow. And most of all, I hope that through sharing our struggles we can in some small way bring openness and light to a conversation in our culture that happens in darkness when it happens at all.
Heather here, in my last hour of my half of Wanderlust adventure. I leave today to return to my mitten of love, and I leave with excitement, with wonder, with mixed, mixed, mixed feelings over the past three weeks. It has been a fantastic time of bicycling and camping with a group of women. It has been entirely another story when considering the group dynamics and how they interact with our trip’s claim of reproductive justice. I have not yet had the personal time or space to consider how to tactfully explain this nor have I yet released my expectations of the radical community and dialogues I had hoped to engage in. All was never lost, and as one often finds there are a few passionate, inspiring, feisty, and intellectually stimulating women who sparked my fire and kept my heart a burning and smouldering during these interesting times. I expect that I will write a post-wander with lust manifesto of my experience that ideally will shed light and insight into these vague statements I have made…mostly due to the lack of coffee and breakfast consumed at this time. I concede at this time as I have at moments with the last few weeks and will let this process continue.
Megumi: Ghandi said, “be the change you wish to see in the world.”
This is Becky. The past week has been an extremely challenging one for all of us. I watched with pain as several described the hurt they have felt, either by feeling victimized by the privilege of others, or by feeling judged because of their assumed privileges. We have talked at length about whether we can accept one another as we are, coming from many places to arrive as very different people with differing perspectives. We have also struggled with whether we can accept as valid the voices of those we meet in various cities. Some of those voices speak ideas that we thought the progressive movements had overcome years ago, and it pains our ears and our sensibilities to return to earlier struggles. One of the new bikers came with a truth for us, that we and others can only be where we are and no place else. It is difficult to want someone to be where I am. I have to let go of expectations of others and let them be who they are. I believe this trip is still in process and it is too early to decide what we have learned or what to do with that information. We have so much yet to do and see and learn. I am excited to continue and willing to let it all unfold before me.
And now it is Sunday afternoon, and we are leaving Charleston, headed North. There is, as always, very much more to say about everything, but we will leave it here for the moment, and invite you to come back for the story of Wanderlust, unfolding
More from Georgia…..
Tuesday, Hard Labor Creek State Park
It’s Nora again, bringing you morning group blogging from Hard Labor Creek State Park, which was a Civilian Conservation Corps project during the Depression. After a much needed break, we finally rolled out of Atlanta Monday morning, through some serious suburban sprawl and at least one unfortunate sharp object that attacked Heather Mooney’s wheel. We also got Megan diagnosed, and although she did break the arm, it’s not nearly as bad as it could be.
We’re in the market for a tandem, preferably a recumbent tandem, that Megan and I can ride from Charleston to New York City, so if you have one we can borrow we’ll pay for shipping!
It’s striking how much wealthier Georgia is than Alabama, and how much development there is. What were recently forests have been converted into tract homes that advertise “granite countertops” and “side by side washer and dryer!” It’s much harder to find covert places to pee, leading at least some of us to semi-traumatic dreams about peeing in public. We spend more time than you would imagine thinking about places to pee, and the development has led to some close run-ins with homeowners to whom we’d rather not explain what we’re doing in their front yards.
We’re moving into Georgia pine forests, on our way to Augusta tracing the footsteps of General Sherman’s march to the sea. Although I thought that the South was just always hot, apparently this heat is more oppressive than usual. It was easily in the triple digits yesterday, and we spent a good bit of time resting in the shade.
It’s been interesting traveling through the places we’ve read about in textbooks, seeing for ourselves the landscapes that are overlaid with the story of this country. We talk as a group about the ways in which we are playing out history, both the valuable, empowering traditions of women and witches and mothers and the negative, debilitating history of mistrust and isolation that is part of our legacy. We struggle with the ways that we are not as good to each other as we should be, and we are working to create a space and a group that honors each of us, our histories and our truths.
Our bodies, our bikes
Today we are pleased to bring you a new adventure in blogging from Augusta, individual group blogging. In order to convey more fully the depth and tenor of the Wanderlust experience, we will choose a theme and bring you individual entries on that theme. Today, our theme is our bodies, and how we’re relating to our bodies two weeks in.
Hi. This is Becky. After more than two weeks on the road, each of us notices little ways that our bodies are changing. It’s good to see the muscles developing, but often painful as we feel muscles we didn’t know were there. But one “body” thing I’ve become aware of is how we’re never quite clean. Biking in summer is a sweaty and often greasy business. But ironically, it’s the goop we put on ourselves that leaves us constantly sticky. In the morning it’s sunblock and chamois butter. After our showers it’s bug repellent and aloe for the sunburn. I’ve given up feeling clean.
Hello. Its Kathleen. My body is tanned and bug bitten. My body is sore and often I feel out of shape. Its one pedal at a time for me…My body is not feeling too good now. I fell in a ditch in a construction site and my foot got caught and stuck and I believe it is twisted. It does not feel good. In the end, my body will be strong.
Megan here. Unfortunately, I’ve been feeling physically disconnected from the trip after injuring my arm on the Silver Comet Bike Trail as we coasted into Atlanta on Friday afternoon. For the time being, I’m the SAG wagon co-pilot and navigator, but I miss riding my bike tremendously. I miss pushing my body to the brink of exhaustion each day and arriving at camp in the evening overwhelmed by a delirious sense of achievement and pride. I miss the topography, the landscape, feeling each subtle incline and not-so-subtle pothole as I pedal across the South. I hope that I can hop back on my bicycle very, very soon.
Hi, Elizabeth here. I was reminiscing yesterday on my bike in the 101 degree heat about how it seems that my body and mind are finally just about on the same page. Rather than feeling a certain bitterness over the shapes of the earth as we pedal to NYC, I feel (relatively) at peace with the balance of the earth’s hills and valleys. Of course I’ll always be sore, tired and covered in that sludge created by mixing sweat, sunscreen, chamois butter and road muck, but it looks like making my life on a bike for 5 weeks is possible, perhaps even pleasant. hellooo
hellooo this is megumi. on the first day of orientation, last may 24th, stacey told me, “hydration is a process not an event.” this has profoundly challenged and altered my relation to WATER. somewhere in alabama i got a camelbak contraption and it has totally revolutionized my drinking habits. ohhhhh this is my first time typing on this blog so i have so much more to say, but i have so many things to do this morning so we can cross yet another state line into SOUTH CAROLINAAAA!!! who knew you could bike across a state in two days? i have one more thought related to “our bodies, our bikes.” ive realized that cycling is a man’s sport activity primarily because we dont have prostates. its all really rad to reclaim the bike form and know that it is possible for us womyn to enjoy biking across the south east.
H. Moon live from Georgia. Ah, my body….as I type I still have tingles in my right pinkie and ring finger. Every since the first few days of bicycling I’ve lost feeling in them. My legs are always sore, stretching is mandatory! Riding all day, dealing with the continual dynamics of the group, tension mounts in my neck and shoulders….sleeping without a pillow doesn’t help this either. Slathering sunscreen, chamois butter, bug screen, aloe, lotion, gels, ointments, etc. all over my body along with the ever present sweat makes for a nearly permanent sheen on my skin and some funky levels. Food and water are consumed nearly every moment and my tummy lives in a semi-turbulent space. Showers and sleep have never felt so sweet and so short lived. The body and the bike are one through a interesting balance in perpetual navigation and awareness.
Elisa writing now. oooh, my body, my dear body. i’m so glad its carried me this far. my body mirrors my mind in terms of the peaks and lows it has experienced- sometimes those hills go so slowly, with sweat sprinkling off my arms and running in my eyes, and sometimes (often occurring when music is pumping in my ears) my body surprises me with its power and attack of the mountainous lump of earth and asphalt in front of me. i’m proud of my body, but i still like to moan over its sore status. i’m also still weary with bug bites, even deet doesn’t seem to ward them off. i’ve recently turned to the comforts of tea tree oil.
erino with somethinsomethin to say. my body is such a metaphor for this transitional time in my life. caught between physical longterm spaces that i can call my own, this nomadic lifestyle speaks to my physical self and my heart. Yes!, parts, places and people of this trip have invited me to engage my body, heart included, in a fire-y way! Funny how everything seems unexpected even as I believe I came to wanderlust without expectation and have stayed open to the crazee beauty possible on a daily basis. Pretrip, I thought of Wanderlust (the one dimensional, yet to be experienced version) as something beyond the very respected possibilities of my imagination. and yet now the tour has taken its own shape/identity, very similar to my bodily response to all the stimuli of the last two weeks. I’m reminded over and over that my body is my own and is so connected to the bodies/souls of this cuntree and these womyn. my body is a part of the whole. Yes! If i listen, i can hear this biked up adventure wih these womyn and my body whisper “remember me, trust me.”.
And now Nora, and my life on the bike. Rhonda and I, as you know, are practically one being at this point, we travel through the world seamlessly and congruently, flowing down roads and over hills with more grace and speed than either of us have on our own. I feel strong, now, stronger than I ever have, and it’s strange to realize that strength comes not just from being young but from being seasoned, from working my body in new and unfamiliar ways. I also realize, two weeks in, that I feel as much or more at home here than I do anywhere else – on the open road reveling in the sunshine, looking to sleeping outside under the stars.
And a quick hello from Heather… bringing up the rear this morning after the mad scramble of eating pancakes with our host, packing and loading the van, and drumming a beautiful djembe drum! We’re writing on the topic of bodies and it’s an incredible hurdle for me each morning to believe my body is going to make it through the day again and again. It’s not just the tired, achy feeling that doesn’t leave until after the first ten or fifteen miles of riding but realizing that yes, my body can do it and it’s really all about the mental over the physical, mind over matter.
Vanessa Renee here updating a day late because of distracting bike issues with Dean…My body feels tight and itchy, covered in bumps and red patches from constant exposure to bugs and sun. I’ve noticed a few small scars on my arms and ankles which make me feel proud of my progress so far and help me remember the challenges I have faced each day. This morning, my arms and legs ache in a new way after riding Elisa’s bike on yesterday’s ride instead of my own. I’ve realized that my body has adapted to Dean so much that attempting to ride another bike feels forced and presents the most difficult physical challenge yet.
