Good news from J & local friends!

Jason is going to NY this weekend to turn at Lincoln Center with Turkish singer, Ahmet Ozhan. More information on the performance is here and Ahmet's singing here.

Brian Murphy won the well-deserved Behnke Foundation Award in this year's painting category. To hear a review of his work, KUOW. The discussion centers around Rhododendrons and azaleas & so I'm letting y'all know that before you select the audio - I loved it, but I believe my plant geekiness is only beginning to show.

My accomplishments today include clearing more of the bed in the front yard, deadheading the daisies that my sister got for me on her recent visit and getting vacuum bags from the store. I did get info on a possible part-time job, which is loverly. I'm getting jazzed now about the little jobs associated with gardening - there's something very bouyant about working with plants.

Oh, I did do well at yesterday's turn class. It's been a while since I've even turned in class, though I've attended class more regularly this year than in others. Last night, I hit a speedbump & had tremendous energy with which to turn. Fortunately, the ateshbaz - or teacher - wanted to turn a lot to prep for Saturday & so we turned to two songs - about 20 minutes or so of turning.

Since our Sema in Turkey, I have recalled that a semazen I turned with in Galata was praised for turning in very the tight space that we turned in. It's difficult to not bump into someone, while turning, in general and the number of people turning at Galata was a bit large for the space we had to turn in.

The dance we do is best if it looks effortless - but the experience is rarely that way. There is a certain grace to the movements - but if you add other people and try to move in a circle while turning, it ramps up the number of obstacles to reaching that grace.

Finding a groove between two people who are also turning is a job of constant observation & an ability to start and stop on a dime. My turn is evolving, so I'm still paying attention to where my center is & how many movements I'm using to accomplish the turn (three steps should do it, I tend to add a few to compensate for losing my balance).

The yoga I used to do helped, because those slow, still stretches & odd positions emphasize strengthening the overall body. That helps in turning because there's no physical equivalent to the movements you make. In day to day life, you're not going to turn yourself around on your left leg. The same could be said for "the pigeon" or "downward dog". I mean, c'mon...

So when Scott (our ateshbaz) suggested the lengthy walk turning, I focused on keeping my spot, between J & Michael. I had to stop and start & I couldn't tell if we would ever develop into the groove. But that happened & I felt fairly even in the turn as a result.

Ok, time's a wastin'. I'm heading back out into the garden.

Is it racist?

Listening to NPR & This American Life, the episode that came out a week after the Hurricane. It dabbles in the positive, the familiar sounding fairness and superhuman strength in crisis that I actually grew up with, most of the time.

Then there is the more predominant perspective, also familiar, suspicion of black folks. The stories told during this episode fracture along color lines. It's been a topic that folks have brought up in discussion and I thought I'd weigh in here. My gut is that the media perpetuates specific racist responses in society. I also think that on the other side of it, the media encourages a wildly inappropriate sense of entitlement that almost incessantly focuses on material goodies. This usually isn't a problem, but becomes one in times of crisis.

It should be simple to focus on the present - to strip yourself of your ambitions and make sure those around you are safe -- but if you cannot, it's impossible to help. I think that the folks who got out did the best they could, and that their relatives and friends did the best they could and that somehow, folks got the message that it was ok to take care of just your own. I think that folks who are further out, and the media, did the normal song and dance around racism, once it was obvious that the majority of folks affected are black.

Growing up in DC, I found this alarming -- in my highschool an eye opening spontaneous poll involved asking the class what they thought the percentage of black folks was in America, I guessed around 70%, not the national average of 13% -- because I was looking at who was around me and counting. Now that I've been in Seattle for 16 years, I am living in the first neighborhood that is regularly policed, bright, open and safe. I initially found Seattle frighteningly white. Not because I don't get it that I'm white, it's because I remember the hostile looks white folks would give my friends and could sense the tension I felt spending time with folks who could run into predjudice many times a day.

That, plus learning through experience that my every attempt to liberally repair the damage caused by my people visited on black folks was inevitably not enough, somehow resulted in me not having a chip on my shoulder about racism. I get it. It sucks, is intractible and will take life times to reverse. And I think it was a big fat factor in the resistance we all saw to helping black folks in Katrina's levy breaking wake.

So, that's my soapbox moment. I think we can slam the media not just for it's support of racism (through repeated assumptions around black folks) but can also slam it for it's relentless hawking of entitlement. It's really not appropriate.