We Become What We Do

We think we are formed, that we have fully developed personalities, value systems, and ideologies. We think who we are is fairly fixed and stable, that once we have achieved a certain status, become a 'good person', that we are that for all time. We think that we do things because of who we are.
But I want to suggest that it is the other way around. We are who we are because of what we do.
Another way of saying that is if you do not put into practice your principles, you may as well not have them. If you think you are a kind person, but do not do kind things, you are not. If you think you are a creative person but do not do creative things, you are not. If you think you are a fair person, but do not involve yourself in causes that lead to justice and fairness in the world, you are not.
We are what we do, and what we do shapes us. If you think you are the kind of person who picks up litter, yet sometimes you walk past it, you gradually become less the sort of person who does that. You become the sort of person who is not bothered by walking past litter. If you pick up the litter, you become a person who does that more often and values that.
Sometimes, we feel powerless to change a thing, so we do not speak up or take action. But in letting the situation that we do not like continue without any attempt on our part to make change, we become the sort of person who accepts that bad situation.
If we think ourself an artist because we have a degree or used to paint, we might not be an artist anymore. If we worked on a painting or sketched up some ideas in a journal today, we worked at being creative and we are an artist.
If we think ourself a good friend, a good family member, yet we did not interact with any of the people that matter to us, we might be on the way to disconnecting. If we worked at a relationship today, we are becoming more connected to the people that matter to us.
We might think ourself to be an adventurer, but if we have not just returned from, are on an, or are in the planning phases of an adventurer, we might have lost being that.
Our actions and words either build up or tear down. Which kind of person do we want to be? We become that person by doing things that that kind of person does.
You are what you do. What have you done lately?
Who do you think you are?
What did you do today that spoke that? What did you do today that denied that?
What will you do tomorrow to make yourself more the kind of person you want to be?

I'm Glad to Press 1 for English

Yes, it adds about 2 seconds to your phone call and requires you to move the phone from the side of your head and lift a finger to press the button, but hey, exercise is good for you.

I, for one, am glad to press 1 for English if it means that new immigrants and recent immigrants and long ago immigrants get better service with banks and stores and utilities and better access to health care and to get tax questions answered as they fill out the forms to pay their share of taxes to city, county, state, and national governments.

There is a myth out there perpetuated by bigots that their ancestors assimilated faster than the current Mexican immigrants. That is simply false. A higher percentage of first generation Mexican immigrants uses English than previous waves of, say, German immigrants and Polish immigrants and Irish immigrants and Chinese immigrants, and an even higher percentage of second generation immigrants uses English, usually nearly exclusively. And contrary to bigot belief, there were multilingual services and multilingual schools in nearly every language all along the way.

Another ugly myth out there in bigotland is that bilingual schools delay assimilation, while the opposite is true. Kids who are taught with both languages in school learn English faster and more thoroughly, because it is used side by side with their first language, so that the differences in structure and grammar are obvious with daily exposure to the languages in use in real situations, and the kids taught in bilingual classrooms are more likely to be performing at grade level than those forced into English-only classrooms.

In all waves of immigration from all lands, it has been the young that learn the language of the land and served as interpreters for older family members, a burden that is not fair to them and not effective, asking children to interpret adult issues that they might not understand. And believe it or not, English only at the driver's licence department or the bank or on the phone to the electric company would result in longer lines and longer wait for YOU as other customers had to talk through their own family-member interpreters. Having Spanish available for those that can better understand in it keeps the country running efficiently and effectively for everyone.

And you know and I know how very difficult it is for an adult, especially an older adult, to learn a new language, once our brains are all firmed up and all. And think of how hard it is to find time for exercising or reading and you know how hard, especially when there is so much to do keep up with daily life, it would be to take a language class. And you probably know that if you had to move to France tomorrow, that you might pick up some words just from daily living there, but instead of massively re-educating yourself to speak French at the ripe old age of whatever you are, you'd probably just find some English-speaking folks to hang out with in some English-speaking neighborhood. But even then, it'd be easier for you because so many of the French over there have had the polite good taste to learn English. Maybe that is the answer: Make all English-speaking Americans go to school in the evenings to learn Spanish. Yeah, I like that. Free Spanish classes for those that can't afford them and at a fair cost to those who can. Then when we go to the Mexican restaurant or the Mexican bakery or the Mexican grocer, they won't have to put up with us trying to share their culture in English.

Are Humans Warlike?

It has been suggested that humans are inherently warlike and that our future as a species will always include war. Some agree with me by saying "Yes, there will always be evil in the world that we will need to fight." But is war ever an answer to any evil? Or is it just a counter-evil? Are there other options? Are there always other options? Do we seek hard enough for options?

I listen to popular music and look around at society and what we do with our time and what we value and how we motivate ourselves and what we care about, and I am left agreeing that yes, humans have an insatiable desire for conflict that will always lead to war somewhere and at some time. I don't like that answer, but I can find nothing to justify any other opinion.

We love to rally ourselves together into a larger force and that rallying usually, in order to be FOR something, needs to be AGAINST something else. We are not just FOR a cleaner environment, we are AGAINST big oil and cancer causing chemicals and litter and suburban sprawl. We are not just FOR better health, we are AGAINST cancer and influenza and mental illness. We cheer on sports teams even more energetically if they are battling a long time rival that we can be clearly against. The more succinctly we can put a label and a cause on the thing we are against, the happier we are and the more 'good' we think we have done against it ant its 'evil'.

We love to have heroes and heroes have to have a foe and that foe has to come from within an enemy camp. Sure we can have a teacher as a hero, but often even that hero is most known for fighting AGAINST something like gangs in the school or a certain learning disability as opposed to just teaching more and better.

We tried team building in corporations but if the team was FOR a better product, the concept did little to motivate. If the team was placed in opposition to come competitor outside company, or if internal teams could be challenged to excel in come metric against internal teams, the concept lead to harder work and better quality. The 'enemy' had to be in place for the team to rally!

We love to insist that there is a 'force' of 'evil', but often the things we describe as evil are just the same things we do or reward in others. The Muslim terror bomber is giving their life for their God that wants them to act out against what they perceive is an evil of a world gone too materialistic, i.e. US, and yet, we see THEM as evil. At the same time, we revere the 'good' saints who give their lives literally as martyrs for their god or give their lives over to the service to their god. Maybe there is not evil at all, but just an exaggeration and perversion of normal human desires to accumulate goods, to accumulate territory, to protect turf, to protect family. The desire for power in the business world or in a service organization is called ambition and drive and is regarded as a good thing, but the desire for power in some sort of anti-government group is given other labels. But when the same mechanism is at work for something we do not agree with, how can it be called evil when it is admired in another context?

It is easy to think of a world divided by good and evil, but it is more difficult to accept that maybe the person we label evil is doing the same things we are but due to different motivations. It is easy to bomb and shoot, but it is more difficult to find ways that we can peacefully coexist over mutually desired outcomes. Can we find ways to convince the 'enemy' to disengage in behaviors we don't like by finding motivations for other behaviors?

When you get right down to it, most forces we call 'evil' are doing what they are doing for reasons that look and sound a lot like ours, to improve a situation for their people, their families, to glorify or defend their god. In fact, sometimes, they see us as the force of 'evil'. It hardly seems like violence is the answer in that case and it hardly seems like there will or even should be a clear 'winner'. Perhaps tolerance and conversation and more tolerance and more conversation would lead to a discovery of more in common with each other and less judging and labelling?


We somehow think our bombing and shooting is 'good' but can it ever really be?


Peace is hard work and I am frankly not sure we as humans really want it. We love a cause, we love our heroes, we love to have an enemy, we love to have things we can label 'evil' in contrast to the 'good' that we believe we possess and which possesses us.

Maybe if we ADMIT we love our war, then we can work harder to not use it? If we keep insisting we hate war, will we just keep allowing ourselves to justify using it in yet another 'exceptional' case, this one last time.

Do we indeed love war, and at what cost? Young lives lost, young bodies mutilated, young minds scarred. What will it take to make our love of the cause, the hero, the glory of victory, be outweighed by the love of our own individual people? What will make us give up our warring human ways?

People Who Hate

I know people, people who are considered sane and rational and reasonable, who hate people without cause. Oh, they think they have reasons, but they have no cause.There are people who make judgements about other categories of people based on stereotypes instead of actual experience. There are people who make judgments about categories of people based on the mean-spirited words of someone who wrote a letter some 1800 years ago and who himself had no actual cause to make such statements. But even if he did, should we not make up our own minds today, based on personal experience and modern scientific, sociological and psychological and biological, data?There are people who hate and who insist on speaking their hate because they are guaranteed the freedom to speak it. While technically correct, they are not ethically correct, for what is the value in speaking hatred against a category of people?There are those who would do violence based on their hate. And there are those who only speak their hate and insist that they would never harm anyone. Yet, in speaking their hate, they give validation and support to those who might actually commit the harm, and therefore share in the blame.If you spread hate and suspicion and rumor and ill word about a category of people, you are doing wrong. No matter what your reasons.If you have been done harm by an individual, speak ill of that individual if you must. Better that you forgive them and lose your hatred and stop speaking ill of anyone.If you have been done harm by an individual from a category of people, and you can prove for certain the ill was done to you due to their being of that category, go ahead and speak ill of the group as warning to others. But only if you are certain that others in the group are likely to do ill because of their inclusion in that category. If others are not likely to do ill because of inclusion in that category, you do them harm to speak ill of their group just because of the individual that harmed you.And listen to this: If you think another who is doing you no harm and doing others no harm is somehow an affront to your god, that is none of your business. Their actions do not harm your relationship with your god and they do not harm you in anyway, so it is none of your business.You may have the right to say what you want and have all the reason in your own mind to speak hate, but when you do so you are acting in violation of ethics and morality, no matter whether you think you have your god on your side.Speaking hate is wrong.Spreading hate is wrong.Hating is wrong.I can't change how you think, but I can tell you that if you keep speaking hate, I judge you immoral and unethical. And if there is a god like the one you claim to believe in, you god will judge such groundless hate to be immoral and unethical as well. Of that I am certain.

My Amazing Enviable Life

The eyeglasses took a critical hit on vacation when I dropped my flashlight on them in the tent, resulting in a bend whose repair lead to the screw dropping out of the joint somewhere in the San Jose airport. A paperclip made a functional but hideous repair at which polite friends tried not to stare. So when I went to the optometrist for an exam and to order new glasses, I asked them if they would replace the paperclip with something less obvious so that I could look more professional for the special event at the gallery this weekend. They found a screw that would hold, at least for as long as it will take for the new glasses to arrive. In the process, one of the women admired my earrings and the one who had heard about my 'event' asked if jewelry was the kind of art I did for the gallery. I explained about the other media I work in and the optometrist himself then asked whose gallery I had this work in and I said "Mine." Eyebrows were raised and exclamations exclaimed and soon I was writing down the URLS for my websites and apologizing to the doctor if his employees were distracted after I left by looking at my art and that of my other artists online. They were obviously impressed and a bit envious of the whole thing, which left me wondering why it is that I am so much less enthusiastic and impressed at my "enviable life".

Names and Women

I have been wasting time lately on Facebook.com looking for old friends. It occurred to me that one can mine the "Friends" lists of Friends for people one knows and invite them, thereby finding out who lives where and what they are up to. It is fun.
It is frustrating.
Men are there, to be plucked like apples from a tree for your "Friends" list. Joe Dixie then is Joe Dixie now.
But the women? More elusive. Married and not going by the same name you knew them as when you knew them in high school or college or the early years of a job. Or even if you were at their wedding, now 25 years later, they might be remarried and have a new name again.
I kept mine when I married, though it was accident that gave me the reason to follow through with that whim.
I anticipated much progress for "women's lib" in the 80's, after I had been told in 1976 that I should not bother to go into architecture because women would just quit to have babies, and after signing up anyway to find I was one of 3 girls in a class of 80 some architecture students, and after giving up due to a terrible couple of quarters where the instructor would not give me or the other girls the time of day or any critique or guidance on our projects. I switched to interior design school where the genders were represented more equally and treated more fairly. There, one of the senior projects was to, at great expense, make a resume to be printed at a print shop and a portfolio of photographs and design statements of our projects. Without thinking, I used my full name on those items. So keeping my own name when I got married that summer meant I didn't have to redo the expensive resume and letterhead. I might not have had the nerve, "women's lib" progressing or no, to fight the tradition and keep my maiden name but for the great investment in the resume and portfolio coupled with the odd notion that a quirky last name might be of benefit in a creative field.
I wasn't too worried about bucking tradition because I figured it would soon be the norm. What did it matter that a woman had a different last name than her husband and maybe even her kids? It was my name. I expected keeping ones name for life to become "normal".
But apparently few of my generation or even generations since have felt this way. Making it very difficult to recognize from a first name and a 50-plus-year-old-face in a photograph whether Sue Harper is the Sue Wilson I knew in college or not.
What happened to "women's lib" anyway?
Why hasn't this been part of the "progress", that women get to keep their names their whole lives?
Women, why haven't more of you kept your names when you married?
Men, do you really need a woman to take you name to feel married? Why don't YOU encourage women to keep their names?

Obama and Religion

What delighted me about the President's inauguration speech apparently rifled a few feathers. Obama started out strong mentioning Constitutional principles with this mention of founding documents: "America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because we the people have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears, and true to our founding documents." He knows the constitution and the freedoms it seeks to guarantee. He knows the false traps that those less savvy in the issues will seek to pull us into. When he got to one of the meatier statements, " . . . we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth . . . " he was reinforcing the importance of freedom of religion and diversity of thought to our nation and its strength. Every religion seeks embetterment. Every religion seeks to improve the tribe by improving the individual. Each religion bases their methods on different myths and stories and some are based more on verifiable history than others, but all are seeking a better way. To work with others and examine their ways and ideals and prescriptions and values can only improve ones own lot. Each culture and religion and language brings with it some new and interesting color to the tapestry. Look at a Scrabble dictionary sometime. This is the most basic essence of each word boiled down for the purposes of deciding what is and is not a word for the playing of the game. While there, you will be stuck, if you allow yourself, by the quantity of words that have a 'foreign' origin. The basic language is English, from England. Remember that it replaced maybe a thousand native languages that were on this continent prior to several hundred years ago! But what is English about English? There are Irish words and Indian words and Spanish words and if you try to form the simplest of sentences without some word attributed to some other language, you would be hard pressed. To say anything in an interesting and colorful way, you include a stew of words from languages around the world. Our values are the same way. Can anyone really define 'Christian' values? The entire religion was wholly based on the Jewish religion and included many Pagan symbols and celebrations and ideas. Christianity is an add-on to Judaism, and Islam is an add-on to Christianity. So each has more in common with the others than differences. Yet we allow the minor differences to divide us, to drive a wedge between us an that is wrong. It is not good for us, not as individuals and not as a nation. There is talk of our heritage and where our constitution came from. There are claims that we were founded as a Christian nation, and this is patently untrue. The Constitution comes from the Magna Carta. It was influenced by Native American ideas and by many other cultures. The core values are instinctive values shares by all religions and by non-religious peoples. And just as each religion is based on myths and stories that are not based on verifiable history or corroborating evidence, and because the country was formed on setting ourselves apart from the various places our ancestors left, the skeptic is left without a religion that can be called as absolute truth and there is a growing body of scientifically minded questioning wondering non-believers in this free country. To impose any sort on national religion or to even continue to say things like 'in god we trust' on our money or 'under god' in our pledge steps on the feet of the skeptic, the freethinker, the questioner, and those principles are in themselves very very much American. Thank you, President Obama, for giving a nod to those out there unencumbered by the trappings of religion and religious dogma and the divisiveness of focusing too much on the tiny differences rather on the common principles and ideals we all share. Among the thousands of religious denominations and sects in our fine nation, the non-believer has just as much right to their non-belief as any single type of believer has in their belief.

Having Things In Common

We are Americans, those soldiers on the TV screen and I. Yet, we have so little in common. I would no sooner volunteer to join an effort that might ask me to kill a person than I would cut off my own hand with a utility knife. I would no sooner dress in the uniform and subjugate myself to absolutely obey orders than I would steal a car. We do not share in the idea of what freedom means or in the best ways to achieve it.
Those soldiers and I are supposed to be on the same side, yet we have so very little in common.
Soldiers on one side of a conflict just might have more in common with their peers on the other side. At least they signed up, trained in certain ways, live a certain lifestyle, and probably share a lot of the same tastes and interests. In fact, I bet the average solider has more in common with the enemy soldiers than they do with their own commanding officers, and those officers share more in common with the enemy officers than with their own men they command.
What if mothers like me got together with mothers on the enemy side, artists like me got together with artists on the enemy side, and the soldiers on both sides got together to play cards and drink beer and the officers got together to smoke cigars and talk history of military strategy? Let's stop the fighting and form clubs based on shared interests. It might work better than the war thing.

Living It

While some people were marching in marches and sitting in sit-ins and writing protest letters and working for civil rights organisations in big and obvious ways, others were doing the same thing just by living it. I know a man who was an officer in the army. He was preparing to serve in the Korean War, at a training camp in the south in some town I should know the name of, for I have heard the story a few times, but the town does not matter. He had been off the army base for some entertainment and was riding the bus back at the end of the day. The bus was full, every seat taken. A black woman got on, looking tired to him. So he did the natural thing, the right thing for a man on a recreational jaunt to do for a woman who had been working all day. He got up and offered her his seat. I bet she paused for just a fraction of a second before she gratefully took it. The bus driver saw what happened, and stopped the bus. He bellowed that she could not sit there, that she had to move to the back of the bus. The man said there were no seats back there and that she was tired and that she could have his. The bus driver said that people of her color did not sit in the front of the bus, seats or no seats, and she would have to get up and move back. He used a word I will not use even to tell the story. The man moved ahead a step or two, putting himself between the bus driver and the woman and said "You are going to have to fight me if you are going to come back here and try to make her move." The bus driver grunted and probably spat in the aisle, but he drove on.

Nametags

I am a nametag cheat. I think I am pretty honest and trustworthy on other accounts but I do admit to this. I hate nametags. Information is power. My name is a piece of information about me. Both my first name and my last name are pretty unique and I don't want to have to explain anything about either to just anyone. I don't want to share how they are pronounced or where they came from or what they mean or whether I like them or most ridiculous, how long it took me to learn to spell them. I just want to be anonymous. So I go to a workshop and 'accidentally' forget to put on my nametag. Or I put it on my jacket then take that jacket off and 'forget' to move it to my shirt. If it is a two day event, I 'forget' the nametag at home or at the hotel room. If there is a workshop binder, I stick it inside the front cover and 'lose' it there. Or I 'accidentally' leave it in the car at lunch or break time.

But there are two places where I proudly wear my nametag. I treasure my nametags from these events and carry them around on my car dashboard all year for the fond memories they trigger. One is Garfield Farm, where I give prairie tours, in August at an event called Heirloom Garden Day, and at another event in October called Harvest Days. The other is WomanSong, a 3 day festival of workshops and music and talks and art vendors that is held in North Dakota in September. These events and the people who organize and hold them and the people who attend them are special and wonderful and I want to connect at these events and so, there and then, I wear my nametags proudly!

I Say Lunch, You Say Dinner

I got caught in the great Dakota trick they play on outsiders again this trip 'back home'. My sister said she was making dinner the next day and I assumed that meant the nightime meal and that I could slink away in the morning right after my shower after sleeping in. But since she was really making lunch and it would have been rude to leave, I ended up getting talked into staying longer and missing an afternoon appointment. Once, a friend said she was going to come visit me at my mother's house after dinner, and so we ran errands all afternoon and waited for her in the evening to no avail and when I saw her later in the week, she said she got there in the early afternoon and no one was home. I have suggested to people that we meet for dinner and been told they had to work and only later realized I was asking them to lunch not supper and they probably would have been free for supper. I don't know where the Magic Line of Dining Time Name Change lies, but in Illinois where I reside most of the time, 'lunch' is the noon meal and 'dinner' is the evening meal. In North Dakota and South Dakota where 'the relatives' and 'the in-laws' reside, 'dinner' is the noon meal and 'supper' is the evening meal and at least on farms, 'lunch' is what the farmers stop and have as a snack mid-afternoon or what people visiting in the evening have before they part company, as in "Well, I guess we best be going," followed by "Oh, stay a bit longer and have a little lunch," which means coffee and some cookies or cake or pie. If there was a sign along Interstates 90 and 94 telling me where this Magic Line of Dining Time Name Change is, I would have an easier time remembering to reset my definitions upon heading 'back home' and back home.

Ways to Camp

It was Columbus Day weekend. We had been to the Kentucky Daniel Boone National Wilderness with the Boy Scouts in June the year before and decided to return for a family backpacking venture for the long school holiday weekend. We hiked in from the National Park and planned to go out a few miles into the Wilderness and camp the night and then hike back into the park the next day. We had hiked about our planned number of miles when we began to look for a campsite. The trail there follows along more or less the route of a river and there are rules for how close a campsite can be to the trail and to the river. Leave No Trace rules say you should use an established campsite if they are available instead of camping on native plant life and possibly damaging the ecosystem. Unfortunately, due to extremely lax enforcement for quite a long time, all the campsites were too close to either the trail or the river, so we kept going. We had just spotted one we thought would do that was empty so we headed down a little switchback to it and met a couple coming up. They had just taken down their tent and were moving on because a ranger had rousted them NOT for being too close to the river or the trail but for being too close to the embankment because he decided it was steep and high enough to count as a cliff. So we moved on. Finally we found a flat spot far enough off the trail with relatively little vegetation to be crushed and set up our tents and juggled some logs to serve as chairs around our tiny camp stove to boil water for our dehydrated meals.
Then, breaking the peaceful quiet of our lovely hard won camp, we heard a rustling and a snapping and the obviously rhythmic crashings of footsteps and of something apparently very large. Deer? Bear? Nature is fun and good, but animal nature of the large kind is . . . .scary. I do not remember if I had reached for my camera, but I probably did. We were staring in anticipation and apprehension in the direction of the crashing when out tromped . . . a young man in t-shirt and jeans carrying . . . a bed pillow? We gave each other puzzled looks. No backpack, no tent, alone in the wilderness with a giant white pillow? We watched where he went, apparently just to the other side of a cluster of large dense shrubs maybe 50 yards away. We waited a while and surreptitiously crept back into nature far enough to see around the shrubbery and there they were . . . maybe a half dozen of them . . . massive tent, coolers, barbecue grills, boom boxes . . . apparently we had hiked so far looking for our perfect rule abiding campsite that we had hiked back OUT of the wilderness and into the park and to within less than a quarter mile of a parking lot at the junction of two main trails. They drank and laughed and hollered and partied pretty late, but we were too tired to care that much, and in the morning when we broke camp and had our breakfast and prepared to resume our hike, it was so quiet over at Bear, I mean, Beer Camp it was like they weren't even there.

Man-eating Plants, Prehistoric Creatures, and Living Fossils at Volo Bog

Okay, the man-eating plants are merely carnivorous pitcher plants that attract and digest insects, so no humans are in any danger. The prehistoric creatures are not teradactyls but the magnificent sandhill cranes, visible as specs over the golden prairie, but their slow wing stroke followed by the quick upflip is a flight pattern that sets them apart from other birds and their size can only be called awesome and their call is beautiful. And the living fossils are mosses pretty much unchanged from the form they have had for ages of time. This time of year, yesterday the last day of calendar winter and today the first day of calendar spring, there really are amazing things to be seen and heard and touched and smelled out there! Get out there and walk in it!