This holiday season has been “beautifully busy,” a nice way to end a year that started in heartbreak. Mom used to say, “Better is always coming. The trick is to hang on until it gets here.” She was right. Nothing is permanent. The secret, I think, is to convince yourself to remain open.
A very good friend, who we lost earlier this year, started each day open to whatever good there was available. That point of view informs Sotapanna: Up From The Ashes, on exhibit in the gallery at WAL Public Market, 1104 R Street in Sacramento. The show runs from Dec. 1, 2017 until Jan. 3, 2018. The theme of it is regrowth after trauma.
It also ties into the “Me, Too” movement of women who have been sexually assaulted telling their stories. Abuse was a part of my life for many years. Forgiving my abusers and rebuilding my life was, and is, a growth process. Even after horribly traumatic events, it’s possible to grow and go forward. Not easy — possible.
I also have jewelry being offered for sale by Blue Line Gallery in Roseville, CA (405 Vernon Street, Roseville, CA). They have jewelry from local artists on display in the small gallery, and available for sale. If you buy a set of Love Bead Safe Harbor Pins, a portion of the sale goes to charity. The pins have never been for sale before, but Women’s Wellspring, a center for women in crisis, recently sold them to raise money for their charity (with our blessing — women who come to the center learned to make them in a free workshop we just gave, and made pins to sell to raise money for their art therapy program), and they’re for sale at Blue Line, raising money both for the nonprofit art gallery and for other charities. We may offer them online as well, with part of the money going to charity.
Lots going on here, most of it good, so we’re tired, but happy. Hope this finds you happy, even happy-tired, storing up the energy of good moments to sustain you.
This project is about human interaction — how we choose to treat other people.
With thanks to Janice Jow, who suggested writing down and sharing the stories of The Love Bead Safe Harbor Pin Project.
This is the story of The Waitress.
My friend and I went out for brunch one Sunday. My friend is learning to drive (which is badass when you never planned to learn and didn’t especially want to, but you just got a job you like and they want you to drive). When we go out now, she drives at least part of the time, and we stop to eat.
We went to a diner, ate, caught up on what was going on in our lives, and laughed. I approached the register, making my way through the crowd.
The waitress who had pulled cash register duty was young, maybe mid-20s, with big, serious eyes and dark hair pulled into a ponytail, which is close to being the Universal Waitress Hairdo (I used to be a waitress, years ago, and almost all of the younger waitresses wore their hair that way. It’s a practical thing). She glanced at the Love Bead Safe Harbor pin on my blouse. “I really like that,” she said quietly.
She wasn’t familiar with Safe Harbor pins (most people I meet aren’t), but said she really liked the idea. I offered her a set of pins, holding out several types. I explained that one was Civil Rights and Social Justice, one was Women’s Rights, and the rainbow set was LGBTQI Rights. She bent closer and pointed to the rainbow set. “I’d like to have those, please.” Her voice was almost a whisper.
I get it. You have to be careful when you work with the public. Some people feel it is their bound duty to give you their unsolicited opinions about how you live your life (instead of, say, keeping their opinions to themselves and going about their own lives. Whenever people do that, I want to ask for all the details about their lives so I can pass judgement on them. I should get to have fun, too).
She took the pins, met my eyes, and said, “Thank you.”
My friend and I left the restaurant. Not everyone is in a position to bravely trumpet their beliefs everywhere they go. If putting food on the table, or paying for school, or other necessities of life depend on not offending people, your march is harder than that of someone who won’t lose much by standing up. Which means that standing up is all the more important for anyone who can, because then you’re standing up for yourself, and for someone not so fortunate.
She picked those pins, making her public commitment to the importance of people treating each other with true respect, in a time and place when it wasn’t easy for her to do that. Sometimes heroics are quiet, life-affirming acts taken by people for whom standing up at all is hard.
If you’re new to the Love Bead Safe Harbor Pin and you see one “in the wild,” on someone on the street, in a restaurant, at school, at work, or any of the places you might find cool people, you might wonder if there’s any significance to the color, or the charm hanging from the pin. The answer? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
The safety pin is what makes it a “safe harbor” pin. So no matter the color or decoration, it’s still a Safe Harbor Pin. The rest is about standing up for a special cause that is close to your heart. It doesn’t mean you don’t care about anything else, just that this particular cause is one you’re especially passionate about, or is especially relevant to your life, or in the lives of people you know.
The Women’s Rights Pin:
I’ve really never understood why some people think being a feminist is a bad thing. I keep hearing women say, “Oh, I’m not a feminist!,” as though to assure other people they aren’t dangerous, or contagious. One day, I engaged a young woman in conversation, just asking what it was about feminism she didn’t like. This was only a couple of years ago, mind you. She said something like, “Well, I like men!”
I nodded. “So do I, the nice ones, anyway.” I asked her if she thought people should be paid for doing the same work, about as well. “Sure!” But, I protested, men have to support families. Women don’t. “What?,” she protested. “There are a lot of women who have kids and aren’t married, you know.” Yes, I admitted, I suppose that’s true. But what about child care? Women should be home taking care of their kids, right? “Most women can’t,” she said. “They have to work.” And some might want to work, I added. “Right.” But it doesn’t matter much what child care you use or how expensive it is. She looked at me like I was nuts. I had to laugh. “You’re a feminist,” I told her.
She really didn’t know. You might think everyone knows this stuff by now, but a lot of people don’t. They don’t know that at its base, feminism is about women being treated not like men, but on an equal basis with men. That how you are treated and what your options are shouldn’t be determined by your gender, whether you are male or female, in your personal or your professional life. The only two jobs I can think of that are gender-specific are sperm donor and surrogate mother.
There are, however, problems that are either unique to one gender or the other, or far more common for one gender or the other. You are far, far more likely to be raped if you’re female, for example. Breast cancer can hit either sex but is more common in women. Ovarian cancer? Women, obviously. So while feminism is really for any reasonable person, there are a few “women’s issues.” Women still lag behind men in pay for the same jobs, and you can debate how much the disparity is, but that’s not the important issue. It’s that women are paid less, not how much less.
Health care? An issue for everyone, but there are certain things that strike women more. Lack of access to contraceptives. Prenatal care. Lack of access to screenings like pap smears and mammograms that can catch disease when it’s early and treatable. By the way… Planned Parenthood? Its most common services, by far, are health checks for women who either can’t afford or don’t have access to other sources of health care. So defunding Planned Parenthood sentences a lot of women with low incomes to illness and death.
Rape? Do I even need to spell this one out, with the slap-on-the-wrist trial of a college athlete who dragged an unconscious woman behind a dumpster and raped her fresh in our minds? Yep, “She was asking for it because she (went there at all/wore what she was wearing/danced/you name it)” is still alive and well. Women are being held accountable for men’s choices. If I said, “I bashed him on the head, but it’s his fault because he walked past me dressed (fill in the blank) and he had a head,” I’d be sent to jail so fast my own head would spin. But rape kits expire untested and judges give offensively mild sentences and the justification is always that the victim was responsible for the choices of her attacker.
Child care? Women still get tasked with the bulk of the responsibility for child care, but this is an issue everybody can rally around . For most women, not working isn’t an option. The family needs their income. So access to affordable, quality child care is an issue that hits women, men, children, employers, everyone. Remember, we will live in the world those kids run. We need them sane, healthy, educated and safe. Employers need those women on the job, not taking off work because they can’t find child care. Any man worth the name wants his kids safe and healthy. Even if you don’t have kids, you can get behind this one.
Childhood education and nutrition? Another “everybody in/everybody wins” issue. We will grow old in the world that these kids will grow up to run. And once they reach young adulthood, our economy will count on them being employable, and employed. Which means we all need those kids educated, healthy and ready to work. Think you don’t need to worry about this because you have no kids, or you have money so your kids are okay? What planet will you be living on where you don’t need other people to do things? When I’m older, I want to be surrounded by people who are educated, healthy, employed and don’t have any reason to clobber me and steal my purse.
There’s probably at least one issue on that list that you can get behind, which would make you… take a deep breath… a feminist.
That’s why we have a “Women’s Rights” pin. So women and men who really do like women (not just want them) can say that they believe a woman’s life is as valuable as a man’s, and women shouldn’t suffer or be penalized for being female. Sounds pretty “Well, duh, of course!,” but it’s still a problem.
This project is about human interaction — how we choose to treat other people.
With thanks to Janice Jow, who suggested writing down and sharing the stories from The Love Bead Safe Harbor Pin Project.
This is about the day I met the Church Ladies.
I was “churched” growing up, which is to say we were members of a congregation and attended services every Sunday. Eventually, my family moved, and we stopped going to church, mostly for reasons having to do with my Dad and how he was. I remained a Christian in my heart, if a confused one (it took a lot of time to process Dad, his demons, and his effect on our family and on me). I did attend a church for a while during high school as a friend was becoming a lay minister and leaving to attend a seminary, and he asked me to go to give moral support. Then I graduated and moved away, and while I attended the occasional service, I was no longer churched and belonged to no one sect or congregation.
Even though I was brought up in a fairly conservative Christian church, it never made sense to me that only one group of people had all the answers. I took classes in comparative theology, and have always respected other faiths and their adherents, and the right of any person to believe what he believes, whatever it is. Some people don’t believe in any god at all, and while I disagree with them, I recognize that they disagree with me as well, and we both have the right to think as we do. I no longer have much contact with churches or organized religion any more, though, except for a few friends who are members of (very) different religions.
Some of my family members were very conservative, very evangelical, very good at lecturing and not listening, and frankly quite unpleasant human beings. The word “evil” would not be out of place when describing them. And I’ve certainly met additional people who might not be evil, but certainly use their beliefs to judge, condemn and make themselves feel superior to others. These people belong to different religions, or none, but they share an unappetizing determination to Tell You The One True Way. It’s made me wary of anyone who is quick to discuss matters of faith.
So when I saw a group of ladies, dressed nicely, carrying a church banner at a rally… honestly, I was going to edge past them in the crowd. Which is judgemental of me. And an especially odd choice for a Christian woman to avoid a group publicly claiming their own faith. It was instinctive, pain avoidance, based on years of unpleasant experiences. It was so immediate I didn’t even make the choice consciously. It was more like the automatic reaction that sees a shadow, thinks “snake!” and recoils.
One of the women watched with curiosity as I explained Safe Harbor to a young man with spiky, bright green hair and many piercings. He jangled as he sorted through the pins, and it made me smile. I looked up and there she was, watching us, a woman a few years older than I am, dressed in a tasteful skirt and blouse, standing under a banner proclaiming her membership in, let’s say, “Good Shepherd of the Rock Church.” She tilted her head slightly, peering at us.
I was ready to be defensive on behalf of the young man sorting through the pins, on his behalf, certain she disapproved of him, maybe of me. Then she smiled, trying to see into the bag, clearly wondering what we were doing. It was the universal human expression that says, “Hm, that looks interesting and that person is having a good time. I wonder what’s going on?”
As he chose his pin and left, she made eye contact. Okay, I sighed to myself, let’s get this over with. I trudged over (on my crutches), forced a smile, and said, “Would you like a free Safe Harbor pin?” I held out the bag of pins.
She glanced into the bag, still smiling. “What is that?”
I explained Safe Harbor, expecting her to politely refuse. Instead, she turned to the other ladies in her group. “Come here! You have to hear this!”
The other ladies gathered around us. I explained Safe Harbor, showed them the pins, made the offer again to the group. They took pins, just reached in and grabbed a pin without the usual sifting through them. I explained that some of the pins they were taking symbolized support for LGBTQI rights, or civil rights, or… They glanced at the pins in their hands and just nodded. It was information, okay, good to know. Nobody asked to exchange or return her pin.
“Would you mind explaining how you made these,” one of them asked. “We’ve been looking for something like this,” said another. “There are people where our church is, they don’t belong to our church, but we talk from time to time, and they feel unwanted, rejected,” explained the first woman. “They feel unsafe,” added another. “We’ve been looking for a project we could do to show solidarity with our neighbors,” she added.
I explained how to make the pins, answered a few questions. “We have to let people know that if they feel unsafe, or rejected, they can come to us,” one of the ladies said. “They don’t have to join the church. They can just come in if they want to.”
“We want them to be safe,” said another.
Judge not, lest ye be judged, indeed. We said goodbye, and went our separate ways.
If you’re new to the Love Bead Safe Harbor Pin and you see one “in the wild,” on someone on the street, in a restaurant, at school, at work, or any of the places you might find cool people, you might wonder if there’s any significance to the color, or the charm hanging from the pin. The answer? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
The safety pin is what makes it a “safe harbor” pin. So no matter the color or decoration, it’s still a Safe Harbor Pin. The rest is about standing up for a special cause that is close to your heart. It doesn’t mean you don’t care about anything else, just that this particular cause is one you’re especially passionate about, or is especially relevant to your life, or in the lives of people you know.
The Health Care Pin:
Whether your life is saved or not shouldn’t depend on your income.
This was something suggested to me by a Pin Sponsor, one of the fantastic people who got online and asked to buy a set of pins and sponsor a set to be distributed free to someone else (maybe you?). She wanted a pattern that signifies a commitment to seeing that people are able to find and afford the health care they need. She suggested the red and white pattern, which is also used by emergency health care providers and disaster relief organizations.
Wearing this pin shows that access to affordable health care is an issue close to your heart (a phrase which takes on added meaning in this case). You believe that you, and that person over there, and people you don’t even know exist (which, if you think about it, is almost all people, since there are billions of human beings and you probably can’t name them all) deserve access to affordable, effective health care.
Sure, there is a debate to be had about whether or not society should pay for treatment that doesn’t have a lot of scientific evidence to support its effectiveness. Or whether or not society pays for, say, somebody’s plastic surgery to change the shape of a nose that works fine, as a nose. Those are things we should debate and decide.
But should your neighbor die of heart disease because he can’t afford to see a cardiologist? Should kids be crippled or killed by disease because their families can’t afford the vaccine that would prevent it? Is there a basic level of health care that should be accessible to everyone?
Note that I don’t say “this is about universal health coverage.” It’s true, I do think that’s our best option, for a host of non-huggy-feely, practical reasons, but this isn’t about any one approach. It’s simply a starting place, “Yes, I believe there is some basic level of health care that should be available to all of us, so now let’s figure out what that looks like and how we pay for it.”
Here’s one reason why society (meaning all of us) benefits when there is general access to decent health care: no matter how wealthy a person may be, he isn’t self-sufficient. We depend on millions of other people to make, sell, repair, clean and cook things we need or want. Those people do a better job if they’re healthy. And if they don’t have to wait to be treated until whatever it is becomes an emergency, our own health care costs go down. And they aren’t hocking up germs on whatever it is they’re working with because they couldn’t see doctors, which means we’re healthier. We need lots of people at work, earning a living (and they have more available income to spend if they don’t have to go into bankruptcy due to health care costs), making things, buying things. Healthy people do a lot more of all of that stuff.
Sometimes, when one of us is trying to make a decision and getting bogged down in details, Mark or I say, “The first question is: Do you want to do this at all? If you don’t, the details don’t matter.” So this isn’t about what the program looks like, or the funding mechanism. It’s about that first question, “Should we do this at all?,” and the answer, “Yes!”
Yes, you should be able to get your eyes checked, the cavity in your tooth filled, your flu shot, your blood pressure checked and treated if needed. So should I. So should that person over there, and that one (What’s his name? He looks kind of familiar…), and her over there (I think she works at the supermarket…). Yes, that baby with the inherited muscle problem should be able to get it treated so she can walk. Yes, that toddler who ate a watch when nobody was looking should be able to get it removed, by a doctor, in a safe facility.
The peace sign on this pin? Peace of mind. Freedom from anxiety about how we’ll manage to see doctors, or dentists, or get whatever medical treatment we need. For you, for me, for everyone (yes, even that guy whose name we can’t remember. Him, too).
