Dear all,
I get to share the good news his month that we are finished with cancer treatments and Chuck is getting steadily better every day—what a gift! We are still are enjoying loving gifts of food, were blessed by a long visit from his sister, and now find ourselves a little off-balance as we navigate the welcome but unfamiliar territory of convalescence. Though I never stopped writing, I am trying to be ever more intentional and unapologetic in sharing my voice. Thanks to wonderful friends and family, I now have not only a new website but a Facebook page where you can like Pamela Haines, Author.I didn’t post this message with the full moon, not because I forgot—far from it!—but because it was so close to Valentines Day and the love letter we send then (if you want a copy, just let me know). A joy earlier this month was working with a couple of others to prune the peach tree in the little orchard we are growing in front of our community garden. And I’ve started some of my cold weather seeds indoors—in confidence that spring will come.
Love,
Pamela
Numb
A friend had been estranged from loved one for years and was now experiencing the miracle of reconnection. She was telling of her disorientation, wondering at the unexpected feeling of great sorrow in a time that should have been one of undiluted joy.
My mind went back to childhood times of playing out in the snow. On those cold winter days, our fingers grew steadily colder, till we could no longer feel them at all. Heedlessly, we kept on playing. Then there was that time back inside, as we warmed up sitting by the fire or with a cup of hot chocolate, when the feeling started to come back. Our fingers tingled. They burned. It was an exquisitely uncomfortable sensation—coming on just when everything should have been feeling ultimately warm and cozy.
My friend had experienced great loss, and found a way to keep on going. It’s as if she’d packed that loss up in a box and pushed it way to the back of a tall shelf in a dark closet so that she could pay attention to other things. But now, with contact restored, it was like stepping back from a frozen outdoors into the warmth of a fire and hot chocolate. All of a sudden the box was out and wide open, and she was tingling all over with that exquisite pain of coming back to life.
As children, we couldn’t play in the snow with numb fingers forever. After a while we had to come in out of the cold, and we had to feel that pain as those fingers came back to life. There was no other choice. But with other options available, how many of us would still choose to stick with numbness? It can certainly seem like a friend. Sometimes it’s a no-brainer. We get the Novocain so that we can tolerate the drilling, or the anesthesia so that we can get through an operation (though it can be argued that both are heavily overused, and that a few seconds of sharp pain might be preferable to hours of heavy fogginess).
Then there are the ongoing challenges in life, and all the things we consume and activities we engage in with the goal of avoiding or numbing pain. Alcohol, of course, comes immediately to mind, along with other drugs that serve to directly blunt our fears or sorrows. Some of us use eating—sweets or otherwise—to this end. Others go for distraction of different kinds, in entertainment, or screens, or reading, or sports. Some of us just keep working.
Whole industries have grown up, offering a dizzying array of services and products designed to help us numb to pain. Yet, they come at a cost. More and more, we are seeing pain as something to be avoided, something to buy our way out of, something that has no place in the Good Life to which we all aspire. Given this tendency, it’s not surprising that we struggle to find a home for loss, including the universal of aging and death, in our lives.
We all find our own ways to numb ourselves to the pain we didn’t know how to handle as children, and continue to face as adults. If I can’t fix a situation that involves suffering—in myself, in others, or in the world around me—my personal go-to strategy has been to retreat to create a little emotional distance, and turn my attention to something that I can do. It’s not the worst strategy, but it keeps me a little apart. As I’ve faced a loved one’s suffering recently, I’ve noticed that this bit of distance is not what I would choose. I would choose to be able to feel how sad or sorry I am even if there’s nothing I can do to make it better. The only way forward that I can see is to dare to step out from my protected position of numbness and just feel how sorry I am, for his suffering, for mine, for that of the world.
I believe we all need to come out of the numbing cold and go through that exquisitely painful process of coming back to life. Then we will be able to be fully present, not only to the sorrows of this world, but to all of its joys as well.
West and east
Pre-dawn after the full moon
and all my attention is on the west,
now thick with clouds.
Will I catch a glimpse?
Though the chance seems thin
I look and look again.
Heading home, my eye is caught
by color in the east
that grows and grows
catching low clouds
in rippling bands of pink
rising higher, filling the sky.
I am reminded that
we don’t always get
to choose our gifts.
Dare to imagine: A new economy is possible!
Community wealth building
The city of Preston, in northern England, is pioneering in community wealth building: establishing cooperative banks, insourcing services, expanding worker and employee ownership, supporting democratic ownership of land, and developing municipally owned green energy works and key commercial activity in local authority ownership. They are collaborating with large local institutions like hospitals and universities to encourage them to spend more locally, employ residents in deprived areas, and protecting their community-owned land and assets for progressive purposes rather than extractive, gentrifying development—a crucial aspect of maintaining local democracy.
Recently they have brought forward a living wage increase benefitting municipal staff. They have registered five new worker-owned firms, with plans for more potentially involving retrofitters, translators, makers, and new cooperatives in partnership with minority communities and former prisoners. One, founded by members of Preston Trades Council, is being tasked to work with unions to support new cooperative businesses that their members will own and control. They are in the midst of developing a regional community bank and delivering regeneration of the city center, primarily in municipal ownership, including a cooperative housing project.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/01/preston-england-matthew-brown-municipal-socialism-community-wealth-building?mc_cid=f8b25fae00&mc_eid=b2f3d85ae2
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
A landslide victory by Mexican General Motors Workers, voting in an independent union, breaking the vice grip of the employer-friendly unions that have long dominated Mexico’s labor movement.
https://www.labornotes.org/2022/02/landslide-victory-mexican-gm-workers-vote-independent-union
Indigenous communities in Indonesia that are regaining management rights to their customary forests and teaching their youth how to care for them.
https://news.mongabay.com/2022/02/field-school-teaches-young-indigenous-indonesians-how-to-care-for-their-forests/
The successful movement in New York to add a green amendment to their state constitution, winning citizen rights to a healthful environment and providing a model for other states.
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/how-new-yorkers-won-right-healthful-environment
How cultivation of seaweed on the west coast is helping indigenous communities restore their connection to the ocean.
https://news.mongabay.com/2022/01/by-cultivating-seaweed-indigenous-communities-restore-connection-to-the-ocean/
Resources
Alive in this World
A book of poetry in three parts: A Home with the Trees, Commuter Encounters, and A Home with the Earth
That Clear and Certain Sound; Finding Solid Ground in Perilous Times
A book of essays from this blog.
Public Banking Has the Potential to Truly Revolutionize Our Economy
An article on my experience with the public banking movement as revolutionary reform.
https://truthout.org/articles/public-banking-has-the-potential-to-truly-revolutionize-our-economy/
Envision or Perish; Why we must start imagining the world we want to live in
An article I co-authored with George Lakey
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2021/02/envision-or-perish-why-we-must-start-imagining-the-world-we-want/
The Financial Roots of the Climate Crisis
Link to a talk I gave at a church in Houston
https://vimeo.com/showcase/7910215
Money and Soul; Quaker Faith and Practice and the Economy
If money troubles your soul, try this down-to-earth Quaker perspective on economies large and small.
Money, Debt and Liberation
A video of a talk I gave at Pendle Hill in January, 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7nP8eJ5vy8
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance; Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: New link: https://www.peaceworkersus.org/docs/muscle_building_for_peace_and_justice.pdf (or just google the title)
A landslide victory by Mexican General Motors Workers, voting in an independent union, breaking the vice grip of the employer-friendly unions that have long dominated Mexico’s labor movement.
https://www.labornotes.org/2022/02/landslide-victory-mexican-gm-workers-vote-independent-union
Indigenous communities in Indonesia that are regaining management rights to their customary forests and teaching their youth how to care for them.
https://news.mongabay.com/2022/02/field-school-teaches-young-indigenous-indonesians-how-to-care-for-their-forests/
The successful movement in New York to add a green amendment to their state constitution, winning citizen rights to a healthful environment and providing a model for other states.
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/how-new-yorkers-won-right-healthful-environment
How cultivation of seaweed on the west coast is helping indigenous communities restore their connection to the ocean.
https://news.mongabay.com/2022/01/by-cultivating-seaweed-indigenous-communities-restore-connection-to-the-ocean/
Resources
Alive in this World
A book of poetry in three parts: A Home with the Trees, Commuter Encounters, and A Home with the Earth
https://bookshop.org/books/alive-in-this-world/9789768273260
That Clear and Certain Sound; Finding Solid Ground in Perilous Times
A book of essays from this blog.
https://bookshop.org/books/quaker-quicks-that-clear-and-certain-sound-finding-solid-ground-in-perilous-times/9781789047653
Public Banking Has the Potential to Truly Revolutionize Our Economy
An article on my experience with the public banking movement as revolutionary reform.
https://truthout.org/articles/public-banking-has-the-potential-to-truly-revolutionize-our-economy/
Envision or Perish; Why we must start imagining the world we want to live in
An article I co-authored with George Lakey
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2021/02/envision-or-perish-why-we-must-start-imagining-the-world-we-want/
The Financial Roots of the Climate Crisis
Link to a talk I gave at a church in Houston
https://vimeo.com/showcase/7910215
Money and Soul; Quaker Faith and Practice and the Economy
If money troubles your soul, try this down-to-earth Quaker perspective on economies large and small.
https://bookshop.org/books/quaker-quicks-money-and-soul-quaker-faith-and-practice-and-the-economy/9781789040890
A video of a talk I gave at Pendle Hill in January, 2019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7nP8eJ5vy8
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance; Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
https://bookshop.org/books/toward-a-right-relationship-with-finance-debt-interest-growth-and-security/9789768142887A book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: New link: https://www.peaceworkersus.org/docs/muscle_building_for_peace_and_justice.pdf (or just google the title)
Finding Steady Ground
If you need reminding of some simple ways to stay grounded in challenging times, I recommend this website, which I helped a friend develop following the last presidential election.
www.findingsteadyground.com
Other resources from my friend Daniel Hunter
Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Climate Resistance Handbook, or I was part of a climate action. Now what? https://commonslibrary.org/climate-resistance-handbook-or-i-was-part-of-a-climate-action-now-what/
Leading Groups On-Line. https://www.trainingforchange.org/training_tools/leading-groups-online-book/
More resources
Posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
If you need reminding of some simple ways to stay grounded in challenging times, I recommend this website, which I helped a friend develop following the last presidential election.
www.findingsteadyground.com
Other resources from my friend Daniel Hunter
Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Climate Resistance Handbook, or I was part of a climate action. Now what? https://commonslibrary.org/climate-resistance-handbook-or-i-was-part-of-a-climate-action-now-what/
Leading Groups On-Line. https://www.trainingforchange.org/training_tools/leading-groups-online-book/
More resources
Posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
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