Closing the Door and Cutting the Ribbon: Closing Ceremonies for 2020 and Opening Ceremonies for 2021

You know, I love Halloween, I love secular Christmas, but maybe it might be true that my truly favorite holiday is the New Year. I need the time of pause between Christmas and the New Year. I need the reflection of looking back. I need quiet time for deep consideration of values and roots prior to the leaning forward. 

So I want to share several sources I'm tapping into for my own reflection, intention-setting, and rhythm-creation moving forward.

Opening ceremonies & closing ceremonies episode at The Lazy Genius podcast - I'm loving the idea that I can create opening & closing ceremonies, which is language I've adopted from the Lazy Genius. The concept of Lazy Genius is about being a Genius about the things that matter TO YOU and Lazy about that things that DO NOT MATTER TO YOU. I love that on both ends. I'm giving myself even more permission and time to close 2020 for myself and to create a way to open 2021 that feels good to me.

Power & Healing - Conversation for Igniting a Communal Practice of Radical Rest and Healing with Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Dr. Joi Lewis, Dr. Leticia Nieto and Resmaa Menakem - I am listening to this and find it so valuable (you can donate to Movement Voter Fund's Georgia Fund and get a link to the video). It centers the Black-led lineage of practice of rest as a source of healing -- "Justice is our healing and our rest" -- such as The Nap Bishop and the Nap Ministry which says rest is resistance against capitalism and white supremacy. (Did you know you can call the Nap Ministry's Luv Naps hotline to hear a new message every Tuesday? 1-833-LUV-NAPS -- and you can support the Nap Bishop Tricia Hersey on Patreon here) And, in the Power & Healing conversation you can sing with Dr. Leticia Nieto!

Year Compass - from the website: YearCompass is a free booklet that helps you reflect on the year and plan the next one. With a set of carefully selected questions and exercises, YearCompass helps you uncover your own patterns and design the ideal year for yourself. This year's includes a Pandemic Supplement focused on three specific areas: confronting the loss of control, taking stock of the profoundly changed daily life, and assessing the health of your social circle. This was shared in a Facebook group I'm in. I like the look-back that is the basis and beginning of this reflection and planning tool.

New Year Planning Guide from Mariposa Strategies, with great reflection questions, which you can download and start when you're ready. - Buy the creator Annie Sanchez a coffee here "to keep the work fueled and scrappy!" This was also shared in a Facebook group I'm in. I am going to use it as an iterative tool for reflection and planning. 

I use the Passion Planner, which has free downloadable Road Map and Reflection worksheets here which are also in the printed planners. I love the monthly reflection as one element of a rhythm of regular reflection and choicefulness. Passion Planner also shares this blog post on Mindful Passion Planner Ideas: How to Use Memory Planning to Positively Impact Your Mental Health  

I participated in a vision board workshop with Taina M. Brown and uncovered 5 values I think I want to be grounded in for 2021. I have some ideas about using moon phases and earth cycles (which are both reflected in this beautiful calendar I have just put up on my wall) to create consistent rhythms that help me be present with myself, to check in with myself in connection with natural cycles. I'm not sharing any specifics on any of this because it's in a larval phase and will likely shift both before and during the New Year. 

 

Small Stone for January 2

A very good meeting--laughter, coffee, greetings, the right agenda items, smart ideas, insights from all around the table, disagreements and discussions, decisions about next steps, and a plan to advance toward victory. 

Seven gloss-free ways to be happier in 2013

In the grocery store I was drawn to my favorite glossy women's magazine, which promised advice on “ways to be happier” in the coming year. I didn't buy it. At this point I know that this magazine consists almost exclusively of lists of lists, with the same advice over and over in different permutations.

I'm pretty sure I'm just as qualified to offer advice as anyone who publishes them on glossy paper. So, here you are: my advice to myself and the three other people who might read this, looking ahead to the new year.

Muddle through. 

Deal with stuff directly, even--especially--the stuff that scares you. Have those conversations you dread or feel anxious--and don't expect yourself to do it perfectly. Too many hours of preparation can just increase your anxiety or mean that you never get around to the actual conversation! And don't expect yourself to take a sharp turn in a relationship or fix it all in that one conversation. Just take one little step to deal with what's in front of you.

Know your bottom lines and be honest, but start with questions and listening. This, I think, is the basic advice of a book recommended to me by a friend who knows some of the challenges I had this year, Difficult Conversations. I think this is the advice because I haven't gotten past the first chapter yet. But it's my advice to myself anyway, for quick prep.

Four Teaching Tips & Techniques for Fantastic Workshops

Here are some simple methods to put adult education and popular education techniques to work in order to build skills and increase retention.

The first thing to know is this: Adults retain only 20% of new information they hear. Adults retain 10% of new information they see. Adults retain 30% if they see and hear new information. However, if adults hear and see new information as well as discuss it and practice using it, retention goes all the way up to 90%.

Use your time well.

Atheists and Allies

Circuitously, I saw the link to this piece on how to be an ally with atheists. I posted a short comment there:

I had a great experience in a social justice training where I shared my experience of exclusion as an atheist child in a very Christian community in the form of being silent during "under god" of the Pledge of Allegiance. Afterward, a participant who is my colleague and also is a minister came to me and told me it had been a life-changing moment. He told me "I said to God 'God, I'm in the room with atheists.' And God said, 'You're right where you're supposed to be.'" And it really made me cry.

And I want to say more about that here. That moment was so powerful to me because it's so the opposite of many many many experiences with religious people:

Take the Boy to Work Day

Here's Jack at work with mama, from Wednesday August 6, 2008. He carried his first picket sign!

We got back to town just in time to be part of a coordinated picket at 34 Catholic Healthcare West hospitals all over CA, to pressure management to behave at the bargaining table.

When he asked, "What dose guys doin'?" I told him we were there to help our friends tell the hospital management to listen, share, and cooperate, and be fair.

Breastfeeding and Social Justice are Good Friends

"Last year, CDC researchers found black infants are twice as likely as white infants to be premature or underweight, or to die before their first birthdays."

WTF??

That fact is from this article at Women's ENews. In addition, the article includes a couple examples of hospitals who are becoming certified "baby friendly" in an effort to encourage breastfeeding initiation particularly among African American women. One hospital even chose to pay $20,000 a year to buy formula instead of receiving it for free along with "baby welcome bags" with free samples of formula that are distributed to all new moms. That is impressive to me; that's real commitment to health.

Why increase breastfeeding to reduce infant mortality?

Jay Smooth, instructor

So I love to read Racialicious, a blog "about the intersection of race and pop culture." I met the founder at the WAM conference earlier this year, and it was in her workshop that I finally caught on to one of the most important reasons why there are so many discussions of pop culture in blogs that deal with race and anti-racism, gender and feminism, etc. It's because it provides a common language and reference point! Duh, but I didn't get it until I heard Carmen say it. Before that, I just thought, why pay so much attention to something I don't want to encourage? And I still mostly think that in terms of my own pie of attention--very small slices go to pop culture. But I really do think it's important to be literate in pop culture as a strategy for effective communication.

Anyway, on Racialicious last week I saw this piece by Jay Smooth on "How to Tell People They Sound Racist" and thought it was great. I sort of also "got" vlogging when I saw it--I think it was my first vlog. I sent it to everyone in my department at work, and really wanted to include it here. His point is critical, again, as a strategy for effective communication: talk about what people DO--don't theorize about what they ARE. I totally agree. Because I don't want to argue about your identity. I just sometimes need to point out the crap you said.

I wish I knew how to embed a youtube link so it's watchable from here, but I'm a beginner blogger, and that's intermediate. I am not there yet!

As usual, I missed the pop culture stimululus, but I appreciate the discussion

I'm on vacation and checking out some blogs during a brief interlude when I'm not on childcare duty. Found this on BlogHer, a very good discussion of white people using the "n-word" which includes the best attempt I've seen to find an analogous word for white people:

Back to the word redneck. What if a white person of the so-called "upper" class who had never been poor, never in a position to be called "poor white trash" were to call another white person who did grow up poor and struggling a redneck. Would the person who had been called that name laugh with him/her sincerely? Unlikely. I'm talking ordinary people here, not spiritual gurus.

And the post ends on this simple note:

So, bottom line for me, use of the "n" word when it comes to whites who want to use it has nothing to do with what black people feel free enough to call themselves within "the family." Ask yourselves, as Laina suggested in her post, "Why do you as a white person want to say the word at all?" The answer should scare you.

I feel like this post supplied me with some great examples, lines, arguments for a conversation with a person I hope I don't have to talk to on this vacation.