As a journalist and academic, I have spent my life writing. First I wrote about other people: their jobs, their hobbies, their suffering and loss, and the joys they wanted to broadcast for all to hear. Then I wrote long, dense, endlessly annotated articles about the law and the courts and the system of so-called justice in these United States. After I lost hope in both the media and the judiciary as platforms for truth and fairness, I worked with others around the world on new ways to achieve peace and justice. I wrote about that, too.
I continue that work here, though not through academic journals or letters to the editor, which seem painfully inadequate to touch and move people when movement is essential to the transformative change we need in today’s fractured and fractious world. I now pursue my efforts toward greater equity and freedom for us all by sharing with you here my personal ponderings and reflections about life, love, loss, and liberation, about family, friends, and fear, and about the misogyny that has colored my life.
I am fortunate and privileged to sit here in my office in my own home in my own private corner of Idaho. My life has benefitted from the inequality–of money, ethnicity, and race, primarily, but other types, too–that I rail and struggle against, and I am often deeply dissatisfied by my inability to do more. I is not in me to be a frontline activist. I do not march with the protesters facing down the police or lay myself in front of bulldozers despoiling old-growth forests. Instead I send words and what donations I can out to support and invigorate the others who do the hard work, the “real” work, the work that costs them jobs and friends and their own freedom. Sometimes their lives.
Sometimes I wish I were other, but I do what I can and hope it is sufficient to help someone somewhere even just for a moment. I hope my writing brings you something of value. Namaste.
Ruminations 