MN United for All Familes

On November 6th MN will either become

#30

or

#1

If it becomes #30 that means it will have followed the 29 (or 30) other states that asked voters about constitutional amendments limiting marriage to same sex couples.

If it becomes #1, it will be the first state to reject such amendments.

Today I went on Minnesotans United for All Familes first door knocking. During the intro they explained that what has been learned for the losses in all these other states, is that it takes personal stories to make a difference and they asked us to take a bit of time to consider our personal story that we could share.

I didn't really have one and I started wondering why I was there.

Pretty quickly this was answered by the person I was paired to door knock with. "Anne" has been with her partner 20 years and they are raising three children together. Suddenly my lack of personal story was sitting right beside me.

As we did our door knocking practice/role play I came closer to my truth and story. I want to live in a state where people feel safe and supported to be fully themselves. I don't want to live in a state that asks people to hide who they are or feel ashamed of who they are or tells them they are worth less for who they are.

I figured Anne had a lot more power for persuasion with such personal experience, being able to say, "I want to get married." (She did get married in '95 in a church in MN, but not legally of course.) But this also makes her more vulnerable. I've done quite a bit of door knocking, and it still makes me nervous and especially on an issue this personal. And this is WHY I need to be there.

Neither of us had any unkind experiences, though a couple did disagree. Anyway, I'm grateful for this experience and Anne and all the other volunteers and the six rockin states that allow people to fully love who they love. (And seriously if Iowa our neighbor can be so cool, we can too.)

Kale. Yeah!

Okay, there is this man at work (not man as in my dating age range man)- that I think is cool. We've only had very brief conversations, but once for example, we discussed the Dalai Lama and he ended up telling me he once opened a restaurant he called the Deli Lama! HA! Anyway, I don't believe I've ever talked to him more than five minutes, but he recently went to Costa Rica with Habitat for Humanity for a week. I told him that I would love to hear about it and said maybe we could talk about it during lunch one day. He agreed.

Well, today I sent him an email asking if tomorrow would work. (I am only working at this extra job briefly - three half days a week.) I figured I'd pack a lunch and just stay and eat there if it worked.

#1 - He wrote back an email with four sentences - all of which had two exclamation marks at the end. That's right, his email had eight exclamation marks! Because he had an "incredible" experience he is excited to share.

#2 - Instead of me packing a lunch. He said we would go out to lunch "no arguments."

#3 - "Do you want kale?" My friend to her 2 1/2 year old.
"Yeah." the 2 2/1 year old.

#4 - My soccer captain making me laugh by turning his requests for a sub into a poem.

#5 - Realizing that the Literary Speed Dating Event (speed dating at the library where you bring a favorite book) is not only incredibly cool already, but also the money I will spend for it will be going to the library itself. Yeah!

Brene Brown

Lingering Refreshment

#1 & 2 - My favorite toothpaste and this yummi peppermint, both of which had a lingering refreshment effect today after eating a meal with plentiful garlic.

#3 - Having completed the first couple steps of the Curried Lima Bean and Rice Salad with Tempeh ahead of time, so I felt motivated to continue when I got home.

#4 - Getting the Park and Rec summer brochure in the mail with the tennis league. (I didn't play at all last summer because something was going on with my shoulder). It feels much better now.

#5 - Remember this list of books I am trying to sample this year?

Here is my progress thus far -

Books I've began but rejected - Friday Night Lights, Peace Like a River, The Book Thief and Ender's Game

Book I read but considered stopping many times - Wintergirls

And now to the point of all this -

Books I really enjoyed - Because of Winn-Dixie, Zeitoun and the crowning touch, a book whose cover I detest, title I dislike and story summary I find appalling, a book I normally would never read, which is the whole point of going through this World Book List, but actually turned out to be quite a compelling story The Hunger Games. And the movie is about to come out and lots of people know about it and I am grateful to be one of them.

“…solitude matters, and for some people it is the air that they breathe...”

All my gratitudes today are a part of a TED talk by Susan Cain called The Power of Introverts. My father sent it to me.

"Many of us do recognize ourselves as one type (introvert or extrovert) or the other and what I’m saying is that culturally we need a much better balance, we need a yin and yang between these two types. You know this is especially important when it comes to creativity and productivity, because when psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people, what they find are people who are very good at exchanging ideas and advancing ideas, but who also have a serious streak of introversion, and this is because solitude is a crucial ingredient often to creativity. So Darwin, he took long walks alone in the woods and emphatically turned down dinner party invitations. Theodore Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, he dreamed up many of his amazing creations in a lonely bell tower office that he had in the back of his house in La Jolla, CA and he was actually afraid to meet the young children who read his books for fear that they were expecting him to be some jolly Santa Claus-like figure and would be disappointed with his more reserved persona."

“in fact we have known for centuries about the transcendent power of solitude, it is only recently that we have strangely begun to forget it. If you look at most of the world’s major religions, you will find seekers -Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammad, seekers who are going off by themselves alone into the wilderness, where they will then have epiphanies and revelations which they then bring back to the community. So no wilderness, no revelations.”

"It turns out that we can’t even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring and mimicking their opinions. Even about seemingly personal and visceral things."

“There's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.”

“Introverts, you being you, you probably have the impulse to guard very carefully what is inside your own suitcase, and that’s ok, but occasionally, just occasionally, I hope you will open up your suitcases for other people to see because the world needs you and it needs the things you carry.”

Everything is Against Poetry

I asked a man working at the co-op if this was where canned chipotle peppers would be. He said, "Yes," (and as I walked away I thought, THAT was a nice voice.)

and

The first page of Paulo Coelho's new book Aleph. It is exactly what I need.





Not turning on the radio on the way to soccer because I was singing a new song that I finished writing yesterday.













Giving my dad bus directions for a co-worker who wants to take the bus downtown.




Bill Moyers: "He says this is a favorable time for poetry when everything is against it. What do you think he means that everything is against it and therefore it is a favorable time?"

Christian Wiman: "I think what he must mean is that, everything seems to be aligned against the kind of inner life that poetry requires, against the kind of consciousness that poetry requires.

The world seems to be going faster and faster, and our attention seems to be more and more fragmented in these various ways and threatening the inner life, and what I would say is that poetry is a bulwark against these things. That I think people realize in the midst of all this that they need some way of putting up resistance to it and reading a poem can be an act of resistance because it can be an act of individual consciousness in this onslaught of information that is coming at us."



(From Bill Moyers and Company, Feb. 24, 2012)