final detroit 2012 summer update #13

yes, i know that i am a day late with the 13th and final update on detroit 2012. i had to travel back across country and clean and grocery shop and make chili and burn candles and think about things quietly in my own home. tomorrow we begin a study group i am facilitating on grace lee boggs' the next american revolution. i am trying to get organized after all that soft wandering we undertook together these past two weeks. i began a new journal, one with a peacock in foil - a gift from my friend, the poet amber dipietra. i wrote that, for the first time, i feel like an adult. i am heading somewhere with the people i love and it is different than where we've been.

tai amri, his dad dwight, step-mom diane, christopher and i went to the charles wright african american museum saturday. it was so beautiful and so wretched. the prettiest fact presented, by far, being that every single one of us was born of a single african woman. but then soon the belly of the ship that you step down into. mannequins upon mannequins shackled together on wooden shelves. they tried to make the faces look scared enough. impossible. the innuendo of it alone was enough to stir the imagination, tho. they had a little panel on the man who had been a slave trader, but later saw the light and quit to become a preacher. he wrote amazing grace. "t'was grace that saved a wretch like me..."

we went around and got a last round of sweaty hugs at the detroit summer 20th anniversary celebration and headed to the airport. detroit, i shed a couple of tears when the plane took off, did you know it? came home to chilly oakland and used a hoodie to walk to the car. and now we are back to our lives in oakland. this morning tai amri gave a beautiful sermon on detroit and work and jobs and peace. tomorrow, i go back to the office for the first time in two weeks. 

i was thinking earlier that part of my not wanting to write this last update was about my not wanting to finish writing you all my thoughts on revolution and grace and peace and then i thought, heck no, you should just keep on blogging regularly about these things, and so i have decided i will, tho once a week is more likely than every two days. if you want, keep reading on my blog from now on. i still have a ton of pictures and some video to share, as well. i am actually glad that mercury is retrograde right now, because that is an excellent time for reviewing and refining what has just happened, and i hope we all take time to do that and to share it. at the end of the new work talk at the boggs center with both frithjof and grace,  she gave us an assignment that i will remind my cohorts of here. i urge the rest of you to take it up as well: she asked us all write a paragraph or short paper on next steps toward independent electricity production in our communities, or toward any aspect of new work in our communities. i'll post mine on my blog when i write it, as well as sending it to grace at the boggs center. please join me. 

for all of you who supported our indiegogo campaign to get to detroit, you are a part of this project and we thank you. for all of you who worked shoulder to shoulder with us this week, we love you. 

with love and outstretched fingers,

:michelle 

detroit summer 2012 update #9

i went to bed early last night so i could wake up today for a morning reiki session with the amazing and generous andrew plisner in the basement of cass commons. the morning was cool and the air felt soft. it was just the start i needed for such a full day, so i'm sending a shout out to him. 

my friend christopher and i headed out to d-town farms and grabbed hoes to weed a bed of corn. i am always reminded of how much fun it is to talk with friends while gardening - it's a little different when you are collaborating like that, and a little silly, too. my arms got tired really fast and christopher and i joked that that someone needed to invent a garden tool that would utilize a woman's center of strength, something like a "ladies' leg-hoe" that could use leg rather than arm muscles... we then helped harvest chard, arugula, and bok choy for market in the hot house. boy, i tell you what, walking out of that plastic dome when we were finished made it feel like the whole world was air conditioned for a few minutes, so great was the temperature difference between the two!

we then returned to cass commons for an event called "feed one, teach one" led by the young educators' alliance, an amazing crew of detroit youth who showed us a framework they had developed to help other youth (and adults!) identify themes they might want to lead community events to address, such as violence, pollution, and access to transportation. it was yet another reminder that young ones are the absolute best at thinking well about our collective future, and i was so pleased with their playfulness and obvious pleasure at being  together.

tai amri and i then jumped in the car and rushed to the boggs center to nurture community leadership for a more "in-depth" conversation on new work, new culture with frithjof bergmann, and when i walked in and saw the stairlift seat at the top of the stairs instead of at the bottom, i knew that grace had decided to join the conversation. what a treat it was! in this, our 3rd event with frithjof, i feel we finally began to deepen our understanding of his concepts, and to begin formulating in our minds ways to put them into practice in our own communities. he told us that, " the most important thing is to get people out of the sense of terrible depression," so that they can begin to think about what they really, REALLY want, which is his definition of freedom: the ability to think about and do what one really, REALLY wants. other notes from the convo:

• if you hope to get the whole community on board, forget it - you never will. but we are not missionaries or salesmen. we don't need to coerce people.
• frithjof says that it was the women of flint, michigan, who "gave birth to new work" there, one of the several places where he has been nurturing a community of new work. "the men were scared."
• it is vastly easier to do new work in communities where it is blatantly obvious that the jobs are gone.
• he told the story of a successful new work site where the workers decided to keep their business small and when he asked them why they said it was because "you can't eat together unless you are small."
• "a pot of parsley is not self-reliance, it is more of a ritual." i.e. you can't just decide to do new work on your own. it requires a community of people who each desire to do something different to contribute to the community. 
• he identified thinking about how to create your own electricity as one of the key questions and, when you begin doing this, you are getting closer to what new work is all about: economic self-sufficiency within community.
• provocatively to some, he said that democracy is finished - it's been bought. so new work communities connecting with one another is paramount because we are going toward connected communities and away from nations as the way we organize ourselves.
• the idea is to invest in useful technologies, i.e. fab labs that don't get really connected to the communities they are in are flops. "you might as well piss on them!" -FB
• grace summed it all up very well and gave my mind a way of conceiving of the scale of change that new work and community production proposes: she asked us to remember how quickly we were able to go from big production companies being the only ones able to print books, make movies, and make music, to now having youtube and and video cameras in our cellphones. when i think of it this way, i feel so much more relaxed about our ability to do what FB is proposing. 
• we are moving past outdated modes of relation with one another. "what kind of confederation do we want to make?" -GLB. 
• grace asked us each, upon completion of detroit 2012, to write an essay on what we see as next steps for moving toward new work. i intend to take her up on that, and i will share my response with all of you once i finish it. frithjof also invited me to invite him to oakland. i am so excited by this prospect and cannot wait to see what might come of it.

and the day was still not done! we finished it at feedom freedom growers on manistique with myrtle thomas. once again, it was the youth of detroit who led us in a roundtable discussion on the food system and food sovereignty. i am telling you this: there is a cadre of leaders rising in detroit that are just stupefyingly brilliant and hungry for justice. they even cooked us a small meal from the garden and we broke bread and sat in a large circle discussing ways that we can transform our relation to our food by growing it and cooking it ourselves. a few highlights from that conversation:

• someone in the circle quoted former US secretary of agriculture, earl butz, when he famously said, "food is a weapon," to remind us that having our food sovereignty wrestled from us is a covert war tactic.
• "income levels aren't rising like our waistlines." - myrtle thomas on the systematic poisoning of our food system by sugar, sodium, and added fats
• and most significantly, it is our relationship with our food that needs to change. it is not enough to fall into binary, judgmental thinking regarding food, afterall, "who am i to tell inuits and eskimos to 'go vegan'?"

needless to say, DETROIT IS AMAZING! as they like to say out here in the rust belt, "another detroit is happening." as we pass into the last quarter phase of the moon this evening, and as i feel myself instinctively begin to prepare to wrap up my time in detroit and to start the processing of what all i have seen and done here, i am full, full, full of gratitude to the lovely, deeply human and wise people of this city.

god and goddess bless detroit.


love and justice:michelle

detroit summer update #7

have you ever had anything approximating free reign to make something you wanted? i mean with the tools and the community support to do it? well today, in the basement of the church of the messiah in detroit, i saw a space where children and adults alike are welcomed to imagine their hearts' desire. it is called the mt. elliott maker's space, and it is ALIVE. there were about 5 or 6 adults taking a computer class, while a group of children, aged from around 5 to around 13, made things. on this day their project looked like a fort, though there is a bike shop, a wood shop, soldering stations, spare computer parts, and windmills strewn about. i happened upon them as one child was using a digital camera to make a film. she walked around interviewing the other children and i couldn't resist joining in. these babies were so fresh, so open-eyed and EXCITED! the overwhelming thing that i noticed among them - and i hung with them for a while - was the cooperative nature with which they approached one another. i really noticed the older ones looking out for the younger ones, and yet they all seemed to be really letting themselves do what they truly wanted to do. they were so good at working together. i absolutely believe that these are the building blocks of peace. every workplace could benefit from watching them work together so well and so joyfully. 

also, yesterday there was an excellent discussion between frithjof bergmann, the austrian philosopher behind "new work, new culture," and juan martinez, a bike lover and innovator in detroit. bergmann argues that the very nature of work has got to change to accommodate for a world in which  we have literally "peaked," in terms of jobs and growth, and that we are never coming back from it. i know that he is right, but both he and i  think this is a good thing because it means we get to start fresh. it means that we can re-imagine why it is that we work so that we can finally quit doing everything we do for a low-down, dirty dollar. it means we get to put people and communities back at the center of our value system, just as it is for the children in the maker space today. it means, in short, that we are freer than we think. hallelujah! let THAT soak in for just a minute.

some notes from the conversation:

• the economists are saying some really stupid things. "what you hear about unemployment is bullshit. they are trying to put you to sleep and keep you from thinking." -FB.  we don't even count the people who have given up hope for finding jobs - it is a farce.
• there are 3 major factors that have led to the disappearance of jobs: globalization, automation, and the unprecedented move of people from farms to cities (80% used to live on farms, and now only 4-5% do!). this is the "tyranny of the free market"
• there is something wonderful  happening - it's not all bad.
• the alternative to having a job (of course) is needing much less and simultaneously making your own things/food/etc, in community so as to derive the most value, meaning, and pleasure from having made them. community production is what we should be focusing on growing instead of trying to stimulate the economy. what is emerging as the work of the future is community production. this is our opportunity to re-fashion how we think about work so that it becomes something to bring us into our aliveness.
• "the big corporations are not omnipotent - only god is." - FB.
• a reminder that we have not always worked 40-80 hour work weeks. it does not have to be this way.

peace and love,

:michelle