Resting Up

I've written about sleep before.  Last summer, sleep became something of an obsession, as a change in medication temporarily halted my nightly sojourns in the land of nod.  That state of insomnia in extremis lasted nearly two weeks.  Sleep has been mostly a nonissue since then.

I am once again being reminded of its importance.  Unlike last summer, I am not experiencing difficulty falling or staying asleep.  I am having a hard time making time for sleep.

My days are passing in a blur.  An already crowded agenda is being pressured to accommodate an epic political battle and a preschooler's schedule-altering sniffles.  My evenings are spent working.  My blog posts are being written when I'd rather be in bed.

Earlier this week, I wrote that

As this goes on, we will have to learn to live in and outside of our ordinary realities.  We have a long fight ahead of us. 

We are at two and a half weeks and counting in our fight for the soul of our state; and for the survival of our citizens and the patchy safety net that has protected us from the worst that a failing economy has thrown at us.  It is time to start pacing ourselves.

I am going to start with getting better sleep.

Buenos noches.

Life in Exigent Times

I woke up this morning thinking about the Wisconsin 14.  You know, that group of Wisconsin State Democratic Senators who left our state two weeks ago, in a desperate effort to prevent passage of Gov. Walker's union-busting budget "repair" bill.  Variously known, to the Fox News/Tea Party crowd, as "Fleebaggers: The New Cut-and-Run Democrats."

Rumors have been flying that some undetermined number of this brave group want to come home, and may break, or have already broken ranks with their colleagues.  I hope this is not the case.  And more than hoping, I have been signing letters of support, standing on street corners in the cold celebrating their stand, and sending money to be used as needed to support their productive absence.  

But I have had my life interrupted by enough unanticipated departures from normal that I can begin to imagine what they may be going through. 

There were "days of rage" and riots in my youth, when national and international events caused reactions that brought all else to a halt.  There have been several of those times of illness and death that we all eventually experience in life, when work commitments were abandoned, days rearranged, and everything fell away but the focused-upon crisis.  Some of these were protracted in my own life, and nothing was ordinary for weeks, and even months.  There was Katrina, which became a national obsession, as it blew my family members to Mississippi, and to Texas, and eventually brought my frail elderly parents to an involuntary sojourn in my home for several months.  

And there is this moment in the history of my state, and our society.  Every day brings a new round of meetings, demonstrations, and horrific new announcements and developments.  We are in a state of collective shock.  I have talked with many people who say they are having trouble attending to anything besides the spectacle that is our state government these days, and the mobilization of its citizenry.

I have watched our 14 Democratic Senators giving interviews on national TV, and have followed their tweets.  I have learned the barest details of their circumstances.  I have particular concern for Sen. Julie Lassa, six months pregnant and separated from her children, ages three and six.  And for Sen. Jon Erpenbach, described thusly in an article in today's Capitol Times:

Erpenbach looks exhausted.  His hair is tousled and his clothes are rumpled. This is the fourth hotel he has been to in nine nights in his effort to stay ahead of the folks trying to track him down. He is registered under a fake name. “I hate all this James Bond stuff,” he says.

His parents, he says, are paying the bills. He grabs a cup of free coffee from the hotel lobby. He’s been living off of it and other freebies.

He says a hotel maid handed him a stick of deodorant from the house-cleaning cart a few days ago. He’s also grabbed a few little tubes of toothpaste. The other night he got a real deal for dinner. Turns out, happy hour is easy on the wallet. He got five “slider” hamburgers for five bucks.

Friday night, he says, was the first time in a week he had a few moments to himself. He did his laundry, ordered pizza for dinner, and stayed in his room.

He’s been living on the contents of what he stuffed into a duffel bag before making his escape: a couple of pairs of pants, a few pairs of underwear (so few he had to buy extras at a discount store) and his toothbrush.

This is a man who is way past concern with his familiar to-do lists.

Pressure is mounting on this group, as Gov. Walker and his Republican allies try to force their return.  Their paychecks are being held until they show up to collect them.  The Senate today passed a bill that will fine them each $100 for every day that they fail to attend a legislative session.  Last week, the Governor shared with a blogger who had duped Walker into believing he was a billionaire contributor his plan to ratchet up the consequences for the absent Senators, and for capitol protestors, until his bill is passed.  He alluded to his intention to trick the Senators into coming back by pretending to be interested in negotiating, and then proceeding to a vote once their presence had established the necessary quorum.

I anticipate that this particular exigent state shall pass, as all things eventually must, for the Fab 14 and for the beleaguered citizens of my state.  But it is not clear at this point how, and when, that might happen.  It seems as if these fourteen individuals are alone in having any power to hold back the coming deluge of cuts and reverses.  

It would be cruel to expect them to stay away forever.  But their actions to date have had the intended effect of buying time for the people to become informed and to begin to organize to resist the sweeping changes planned for us.  At this point, every day that they can remain where they are allows the people's movement to grow stronger.


I am sure that the interruption of their usual responsibilities and relationships is costing each of them dearly.  I would hope that all of us can recognize that the history we are making--that we did not necessarily choose to have to make--takes precedence for now.  

As this goes on, we will have to learn to live in and outside of our ordinary realities.  We have a long fight ahead of us.  

My deepest appreciation to the Fab 14 for their leadership and their sacrifice.

Best Laid Plans Meet History-Making Occurrences

My elephant is in revolt today.  


It has thrown off my rider, who sits dazed, in the dust, wondering what happened.  And the pachyderm has plunked itself down right beside her, refusing to budge.


If you read my earlier post on the work of the Heath brothers, Dan and Chip, and specifically their book Switch:  How to Change Things When Change is Hard--or if you found your way to their thoughts on your own--you may recognize the elephant and rider metaphor they borrowed from Jonathan Haidt (The Happiness Hypothesis).  The elephant, you'll recall, represents our emotional self and the rider our rational side.  And these two have to have a workable arrangement if we are to move forward, or in any intended direction, for that matter.


Watching in a somewhat--okay, a completely--obsessive state the various dramas unfolding around me these past days, at the state, national and international levels, I am left wondering about the sense of following my little plans, or even my relatively grander ones.  Events, it seems, defeats, changes, and even accomplishments can come flying in from left field.  


I suppose I feel a little like I remember feeling many years ago after viewing a documentary in my then-husband's astronomy class.  The film took the viewer from the vastness of deep space, with its black holes, red dwarfs and quarks, to the microscopic worlds of cell life, and micro organisms.  The photography was breathtaking.  And at the end, I experienced something like a case of the psychological bends.  I felt simultaneously infinitesimal and insignificant, and planetary and profound.  It was dizzying.


And I wasn't sure if it mattered if I roused myself to leave the seat from which I had watched the hour-long spectacle.  Ever.  But I did.


I assume that my elephant and rider will eventually patch things up.  They usually do.  In the meantime, I'm in the wind, following the current.  This evening, I was blown to the streets, to yell myself hoarse about "what democracy looks like," while the literal wind whipped my face, and my sign about trampling on workers smacked me in the head more than once.


Tomorrow, I will be in Madison.  And after that?  It seems we are all subject to forces we can't foresee.


Later, for our plans.

Stopping for Stupidity

The business of citizenship is taking more and more of my time these days.  

It seems there's a fresh battle forming on every front.   I live in the formerly great state of Wisconsin.  Here, we are at ground zero in the struggle to resist a radical right wing agenda that threatens to reshape our polity.  My state's Democratic senators are in hiding as I write this, attempting to delay a vote that seems almost certain to adopt the draconian measures proposed by our newly inaugurated Governor  in his effort to balance the budget.  Schools across the state are closed, as teachers join the throngs in protest.

Scott Walker's bill would strip public workers of nearly all collective bargaining rights, require their unions to be recertified every year, and allow workers to opt out of paying their union dues.  As a sop to a corporate campaign contributor, a section of wetlands would be made available for development.  Graduate assistants in our state's public universities would no longer  be eligible for in-state tuition, which would vitiate important research projects and cripple our world-class institutions of higher education.  On the heels of maneuvering to send back $800 million in federal funding for high-speed rail, and the thousands of jobs it would have created in our job-hungry state, it is rumored that the Governor is threatening to refuse Title I funding for low-income students in our public schools, on top of budget cuts of $500 per student in his proposed budget "repair" bill.  Every time I log onto my computer, I find the reactionary wildfire breaking out in a new sector. 

This morning, I spent time updating links on my organization's website to direct people regarding protest participation, and contacting their legislators; I contacted my own legislators; I attempted to call the Governor's office to register my opposition, but after spending a half hour listening to busy signals, and finally getting a ceaseless ringing that magically morphed into yet another busy signal (!), I gave up and sent an email.  Then, attending to a separate disaster, I called my U.S. Representative to register my concern about the public media funding threat, up for a vote today in Washington.

I will probably end up in our state capitol, along with tens of thousands of my fellow citizens, before the week is out.  And no, I don't have time for this.  But what else is more important right now?

Again, my business as usual must be set aside.  As my Governor attempts to let the world know that "Wisconsin is Open for Business," I am pulled away from mine.  And I am depressed about the future he and his confreres seem determined to force upon us.

If Service is the Rent We Pay, I Need a Rent Party

Marian Wright Edelman is most often cited as the source of the saying "Service is the rent we pay for living." In her book  The Measure of Our Success : Letter to My Children and Yours,  she credits her parents with teaching her this view.  Her parents may have been quoting Shirley Chisholm, or Harry Strunk whose paraphrase was engraved in stone on the front of his newspaper building, or Lord Halifax, contemporary of Churchill and Gandhi.  But the issue of provenance is less important than the compelling weight of the phrase.  Edelman goes on to say that service "is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time."


Lately, my rent has been going up.  And spare time?  What's that?


In the form of volunteer leadership in the nonprofit community organization to which my church belongs, my "rent" has risen over the past two years to take up a good half of my working hours.  The meetings I bemoan are, for the most part, occasioned by my membership in no less than six task forces, collaboratives, teams, committees and subcommittees related to the work of this organization.  I am up late, and up again early most days, discharging one obligation or another incurred as a result of this affiliation.  And I have been mostly happy to be thus engaged.


When I joined a Unitarian church after spending all of my adult life "unchurched," I welcomed the opportunity to become more involved in social justice work.  Four of my church's seven principles underscore this value.  UUs (Unitarian Universalists) "affirm and promote"  

• The inherent worth and dignity of every person;
• Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;
• The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;
• Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

In the course "Building Your Own Theology," which I finally took after about six years in my church, I constructed a personal credo centered on service. Doing peace and justice work is the major way that I have experienced anything remotely resembling "the sacred" in my life.

But I'm beginning to think I may have gone too far.  And I am having trouble placing this major consumer of time in the context of procrastination.  Is all (or some) of this absorption in the needs of others a dodge, at least partly a way to avoid working on my own goals and dreams?  Does it balloon as a result of the difficulty I have in saying no, and in setting and maintaining sensible boundaries?  Am I (shudder) globally codependent?  How do I balance "the work of this church" with the work of this woman?  Have I become, as my children assert, a "church lady?"

The amount of grumbling and swearing I've been doing this week and last, as I slog through the final details of the huge annual fundraising project I've somehow been left in charge of, are probably telling me something.  Above and beyond is where I've been going for quite a while, and I recognize the need to tether myself a bit more securely to the ground of my limited self before I leave the stratosphere.  

The way this organization (and probably most others) works, there will be precious little respite between this now-routine crisis and the next.  So, in the words of Ron Weasley,  "she needs to sort out her priorities."