Inauguration Rumination

This piece was written as a Lay Liturgy reflection for the Unitarian Church of Harrisburg PA Jan 22, 2017
©JD Stillwater

Five minutes into my morning meditation on Friday, I became aware that my mouth was working furiously, mindlessly. All on its own. My tongue was on a self-assigned search-and-destroy mission to find and swallow every tiny scrap of breakfast still lurking between and behind my teeth. 

I am not a veteran meditator. Thoughts pass through like Oregon-trail wagons, some full of manure, some gold. As I got my tongue to settle down, I mused again about my mouth having an autopilot, so much like a cow’s, or a dog’s hind leg when you scratch her belly. I felt myself to be very much an animal. 

The next thought-wagon to pass brought a line from Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese. 

You do not have to be good.

…
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

The soft animal of my body. Young children I’ve asked are pretty insistent that we are not animals. Such is the early influence of myth, and the language that enforces it. Of course, scientists have known for many years that we are animals, not only by biological definition but also by direct kinship. 82% of my genes are traceable to my cousin your pet dog, and there is 80% genetic overlap with those cud-chewing relatives I was mindlessly imitating Friday morning. 

The stories we tell ourselves profoundly affect our outlook. Here I was on the morning of a presidential inauguration, musing about the soft animal of my body derailing my search for higher spiritual attainment. My next thought came like a proverbial revelation from God. 

I imagined billions of walking monkeys trying to manage a global technological civilization. Animals that scratch their armpits, bite their fingernails, pick their noses, lash out at each other; animals that are sometimes completely out of control in the rut of mating season. Animals that can’t even manage to still their own tongues for five minutes. We are “planet of the apes.”

No wonder we take three steps forward and two steps back. No wonder we get scared and lash out. Of course we make stupid, short-sighted choices. I became filled with compassion for us. How can I have anything but patience, tenderness, and amusement for these creatures, these apes, who struggle so mightily to reconcile our instinct-driven nature as evolving mammals with our highest aspirations for a global commonwealth of enlightenment and purpose? 

We get impatient with ourselves and each other because the story, the myth we tell ourselves, is that we are civilized human beings, so we should “know better.” 

We should do a better job thinking ahead seven generations. We should use evidence-based reasoning, should care more about this or that, should, should, should. As my older brother is fond of saying: “JD, you always talk about what should be, and I’m telling you what is.” 

Sitting in my chair Friday morning thinking about chimpanzees driving trains and sitting at desks, all my political anxieties and frustrations melted away. We are the rats that sign weapons-control treaties. We are the millions of monkeys banging away on keyboards, that actually created the complete works of Shakespeare! And Wikipedia. And Mary Oliver’s poem. We are the squid that go into space, the hyenas that care for the helpless, the vulnerable, the homeless. We are the ants that vote. 

Let the compassionate story we tell ourselves be about animals that evolve and struggle and fail, zig-zagging our way towards our own lofty aspirations. We are animals, with soft animal bodies and some really hard animal instincts. Of course we do embarrassing things in public. But we’re doing pretty darn well, considering. 

Brown Bread, Pink Skin

When I was a kid, my parents were into whole grains - brown rice, brown bread, even really weird grains like bulghur and triticale and millet. Now it’s mainstream, but that “healthy-eating whole foods” mindset  was pretty radical in the 1970s. I got teased at school for my brown bread, to the point where I didn’t want sandwiches in my lunch. I fantasized about fluffernutter sandwiches on Wonder bread. My mom would say “That’s dessert, not lunch; it’s worse than candy.” When we were older, she started calling such things “food porn.” I say that to my kids!

By way of explanation, my parents told a story about how in their parents’ childhoods, the ‘aughts’ to the 20s, whiteness was closely associated with purity, with cleanliness, with goodness. Anything brown was dirty, simple as that. So producers went to great lengths to remove all traces of color (and, unwittingly, all the healthiest parts of the food) from wheat, rice, and sugar. My mom said all the nutrition was in the molasses, the by-product of sugar refining. She would scoff as she said that word “refining.” For my parents, youthful rebellion included making and eating their own bread, brown bread, full of the whole brown nutrition they missed in their childhoods.

Monday morning last week, Martin Luther King day, Ann and I stood in the bathroom facing the mirror together, and the difference in our skin colors was truly striking. My skin is nothing like white, at least compared to Ann’s. My skin is blatantly, obviously, dangerously pink, with lots of red moles; anyone can see that. Ann’s isn’t white, either. Her skin leans a bit towards a light green, at least compared to mine. I understand that it is polite to call her skin-tone “olive” rather than green. Why is that? Why ARE we called White, when even the palest among us is far from white, the color? 

Recently, I have oh-so-tentatively begun to include skin tones in my descriptions of people, saying "She is tall, with long braids, and light brown skin" or "He is medium build, with very short tightly-curled hair, and very black skin" or "He is pretty short, has yellow-brown skin, and rich black wavy hair, cut short but not buzzed." If this is acceptable (please use the comments to correct me), I darn well better not limit it to people of color, right? So how would I want my skin described? Pale? That's a start, but in my gut it feels like a euphemism for "white." There is a vast range of skin tones among people of color. I'm well aware that some Black people are lighter-skinned than many White people. I thought I was stuck with "pale" for White people. Until Monday morning. 

I think my parents’ story about food processing has something to do with this. Of course, my parents were right about food refinement, but I don’t recall anyone in my family ever connecting any of that to race or skin color. 

The turn of the last century, my grandparents’ childhoods, brought a wave of Italian immigrants, who were described as “swarthy.” What a word that is, “swarthy”! It means dark-skinned, especially with olive tones, but the usage example that goes with Google’s definition of “swarthy” reveals a connotation of vague threat, of intimidation: “she looked frail standing next to her strong and swarthy brother.” If you digested your share of Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys mysteries in your childhood, you know exactly what I mean: swarthy equals threatening. 

There is a book titled "How the Irish Became White." It and other studies make clear that the boundaries of whiteness have more to do with history, immigration, language, and power than with skin color. 

I think the reason we call pink skin and light green skin and lots of other colors of pale skin “white” is because we are subconsciously choosing Purity over Wholesomeness. Safety and comfort over health and strength. The fences around that false purity move and shift as the decades and the waves of immigration come and go, but there’s always white and non-white, because the myth of white purity demands it. Never mind that no human skin is actually white. 

I bear all the privileges and responsibilities of being “white.” I’m not trying to distance myself from my race. But if you want to describe me to somebody, then yeah “He’s a white guy,” but don’t say JD has white skin. It ain’t. It’s pink. With red polka-dots. And it’s made out of nutritious, whole-wheat, dark, brown, bread.