Pipe Smoke and Purposelessness
This weekend, all I did was journal, run errands, and smoke.
I figured out something important. I really only became a teacher for 3 reasons:
I was asked/challenged
I wanted to explain myself to the world
I wanted to earn my keep
I knew a job was expected of me but I allowed myself to be convinced that I could and should do something practical and useful to world.
Jimmy Santiago Baca told me to my face that it felt irresponsible to tell young college students that the art matters more than employability.
None of us were totally sure we could trust the world to care for us if we acted like we believed that our art was useful for the world.
This weekend I’m remembering this excellent post by
.“it’s by design the system makes you feel at fault for any lack of success.”
”There is nothing in this I wish to conquer, nor to win. I shouldn’t have to. I want to live. And I want to live fully.”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about the language and state of being ‘on the market’… the phrase, it harkens back to dark images of my ancestors stood on the auction block, forced to lay their humanity up for sale. It reminds me that history is still embedded into our collective present reality of laboring.”
It was an interesting weekend realizing all of the ways I have changed myself in order to be of use.
Unpublished poem excerpt:
When I was a church girl
Certain my prayers could nurture the world…
When I was a moderate political wife in training
Certain my articles could enlighten the nation…
Are you looking for the wrong thing?
Unpublished poem excerpt:
I wonder if my father ever felt the more life a room contained
the less life was available to him.
I wonder if he ever felt other people's eyes
picking at his bones to make sure they were clean.
He was lucky.
I pray to be beautiful; he just wanted to be seen.
I pray for abundant life; he just wanted to be free.
I have seen the fatted calf; he did not know what he was missing.
I have stood at the threshold of the veil; he has never seen the anointing.
My father was an un- and underemployed artist. At 17, there was no chance I would go willingly onto that same path. Now I see the appeal and I wonder who I would have been had I been real.