Flower
July 25, 2020 In Musings By mlantin

Thoughts on a pandemic

So much has been written. What could I possibly add? I could point to the things I have repeated over and over to myself, to others. To the similarities. To the contrasts.

The shame of pandemic nostalgia. The privilege of living through this and feeling there was ground under my feet. Being able to reflect on a silver lining. The contrasts were stark — the suffering elsewhere so immense as I sat beside a pond recording birds and appreciating the slow quiet.

Shame because I know I don’t deserve this position. I have been incredibly lucky. Responsibility too. Given this oddly shaped bubble of retreat, how do I emerge with even more resolve for the good? How do I resist the undertow of recreating the old?

How did I lose the “we”? Is this what social distancing does? We are all living through this but in many different ways. Is there a stream, a song, that might connect us all at the exit? Is it BLM? Social Justice?

But it’s not over, I hear again and again. Yet I can feel the acceleration. Now it’s both. The virus and the machine.

I desperately want us to make wise choices. I want us to emerge with a sense that if we could do this, we can do anything. We can restructure for a slower world that includes the songs of birds as treasure.

If there is a song of reinvention, is it dissonant? I realize I have lost faith in universality. And yet, a part of me resists. There is an objectivity in what nurtures, what connects, what heals. Surely, a stance of courage and love for the world is universally desirable. I need to believe this. I listened to a podcast once that asked the question “What belief do you hold that, if proven wrong, would fundamentally destabilize you?”. At the time, I couldn’t answer. Now I could.

I know the rest of this year will be both unbearably hard to watch, and arrestingly beautiful. The contrasts will continue and with them a call for expansive and acute awareness.

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Epic Walk Sep 3 (gatherings)
September 3, 2018 In Epic Walk Diaries, poetry, Research By mlantin

Epic Walk Diaries (September 3) 

moby moby x2 maybe
not sure how much got in
science is constrained creativity
  art bounces off people
  science bounces off the universe

fear 
i can't do this
no truer words
  don't worry, it'll come back
  then you die again

 none of this is ours
   or theirs damnit
   be bold
peasant grass
  you let yourself go
designer grass
   tight weave
upscale private grass
    small bred patterns
   even your color says good dna
 look where you get to be
cartoon rich

the sound of peasant grass
  crickets and walking feet

rose petal feast
  mom, her jam and pastry

pineapple plant
  it does smell like pineapple!
    keith loved it

discarded fragments
  more fragments
   pattern! source!
a nut? a flower
   yes with seeds
     opened in quarters
       two quartered seeds
     look at the ground

  not so good with transitions
    sprint!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
      run to the finish line and jump
   no no ritual endings

-----

[
  Start 5:26pm
  End 9:00pm
  Through kits beach, pool, sunset point
  brambles, rich road, Jericho, Spanish Banks,
  concession, and back.
]
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August 20, 2017 In Musings By mlantin

Do I really need to look at this? Yes, you do.

After a few people asked me what I thought about the Google memo, I realized that I didn’t know. I hadn’t wanted to give it any thought at all. I decided to put my mind to the question, and maybe even to the meta question of why I hadn’t wanted to look at the question.

What I saw there was annoyance, hurt, embarrassment. Annoyance that I even had to contemplate this kind of justification for the unequal environment in the tech field. Hurt that it was worth so much air time on social media, news sites, radio, podcasts, etc. I really wanted to be in a world where issuing a memo like that would be treated like a memo saying the earth is indeed flat. Embarrassment that a part of me still believes what he’s saying.

Because yes there is a part of me that feels abnormal. I have loved math, science, computer programming from the moment they entered my awareness. I don’t want kids. I don’t want to be married. What does that make me? A kind of genetic anomaly? Early on, I decided to let the question hang and just continue. It would periodically hit me in the face like a glass ceiling. Then I would think about the weird situation I was in, pick myself up and keep going. This has been the method and, well, so far so good. I honestly thought things were getting better and maybe they are, but this person at Google decided to say, not only that women are not as well suited to engineering, but that the women that are, are somehow the abnormal ones. It was like a double blow, throwing both groups under the bus. It felt like a step backward and brought an unwelcome realization that we still need to talk about this.

I am in Vancouver and yesterday there was a planned anti-immigration and anti-muslim protest. I attended the counter-protest, what I call the gathering of hearts, which took up so much space that there was no room for the hatred. I felt it was my civic duty to show up, to have my presence added to all who value the strength and generosity of this place. When I heard Tina Fey end her brilliant sheet caking skit by saying we should ignore the white supremacists, I understood what she was saying. She wants that world where their view is so marginal that it can be just a blip in an otherwise generous and welcoming society. She wants the same world I want. Can’t we just be and make stuff? Why do I need to pause and say hatred has no place? Part of me absolutely resents it. But a much bigger part knows that the reality I want requires my unrelenting gaze at the truth. And the truth is we’re not there yet. So I show up. I think about the memo. I look at my own biases. And above all, I keep on making stuff.

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