Thinking Like a Community

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the disappointing, but not unexpected, outcome of Happy the Elephant’s case. Taken with similar attempts to imbue animals with legal personhood, this can induce a lot of despair: fringe legal philosophies have not produced the change we’re hoping for.

But perhaps there is another way to go, which learns from contemplative and deep ecological perspectives. At 5:30am on election day I rode my bike to the polls and was treated to a magnificent dawn chorus of San Francisco’s diverse and colorful bird population. A thought flew through my mind: The birds don’t know and don’t care that there is an election today. Much of what we will vote on (transit, construction, garbage collection) will directly affect their lives, but they are not involved in this process–they live adjacent to it, oblivious of what it may bring in its wings. Who will speak for their interests at this election? 

I’m obviously not the first person to introduce contemplative practices into ecology and animal rights. In their 1988 book Thinking Like a Mountain: Toward a Council of All Beings, John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Flemming and Arne Naess propose a blueprint for human decisionmaking that takes all perspectives in mind. Through transformative, contemplative practices, a Council of All Beings invites humans to deeply adopt and articulate the perspectives of nonhuman entities in decisionmaking. I participated in one such Council as part of a facilitator training; I spoke for a mushroom and some of my fellow participants spoke for parrots, rocks, and blades of grass. It was a profound immersion in the interests, if they can be called that, of nonhuman entities.

This transcendent notion of perspective taking has migrated from deep ecological theory to the legal realm, with some expressing optimism for its potential for transformation. In his article We Are the River, my colleague and friend David Takacs offers some examples: The New Zealand Parliament has recently granted the Whanganui River and the Te Urewera mountain ecosystem rights as legal persons, with a Māori governing board to speak for the nonhuman entities, based upon traditional cultural precepts. Similarly, governments in Australia, Colombia, Ecuador, Bangladesh, India, Uganda, and the U.S. have also declared that rivers and other living systems have legal rights. While these initiatives stem from  disparate historical, philosophical, and legal backgrounds, and pursue disparate goals, they all seek to enshrine in the law the fundamental symbiosis between human and nonhuman ecological health, and to empower suitable stewards who will nurture that symbiosis. As Takacs explains, newly vested spokespersons for nature–often indigenous populations, who savvily position themselves as more authentically empowered to speak for natural entities–can, and sometimes do, turn novel legal theories into real legal work that protects human and nonhuman communities. 

So, perhaps the solution to our failure to effect real change through animal personhood is to eschew performative (often prosecutorial and anthropomorphized) rhetoric on behalf of animals and give some careful thought, through discerning political considerations and contemplative experiences, to two important questions: what are the genuine interests of nonhuman animals and who should be vested with the authority to represent these interests? As I explained here and here, and as Justin Marceau explains so well here, deep engagement with the true interests of nonhuman animals does not and should not include a reliance on incarceration. The answer, perhaps, is that criminal courtrooms are not the right places for deep, thoughtful perspective-taking. This is not to say that meditative retreats or multiparty government meetings would be completely free of anthropomorphism: any humans speaking for nonhuman entities necessarily translate very different lives to their own into human terms and might, manipulatively or carelessly, twist or convert these into their own interest. This is why it is essential to identify speakers for animals who are truly curious, knowledgeable, and sincere. 

When we understand on a deep level what animals want (they are more similar to us than we might think, as Larry Carbone explains in his treatise on laboratory animals), the solutions are up to us. Bruce Friedrich of the Good Food Institute often explains that the true solution to the horrors of factory farming lie at least partly in the hands of the market: we must create substitutes to animal products that taste the same or better, and cost the same or are cheaper. Would factory farmed animals provide us with this solution? Naturally not. This is an entirely human solution, derived from an entirely human conceptual world, for the genuine problem nonhuman animals face–the horrific reality of exploitation and torture that is the CAPO industry. What Friedrich’s solution shows us is that, when we set out to comprehend the unmediated experience of our fellow living beings, with as little imposition of our own agendas on it as possible, we can then fashion human solutions to these problems. I resolved to participate in (human) elections and vote on measures that humans introduced, and on human candidates, while “thinking like a mountain” at the ballot box.

But we can find even more uses for thinking like a community, such as in physical and mental health matters. Recently, I read and enjoyed Will Bulsiewicz’s Fiber Fueled and listened to this podcast with him, in which he explained that we should think of our eating habits as eating not just for ourselves, but for a whole community including trillions of microbes. What I eat is for them as much as it is for me, or for whatever “me” is (not that easy to parse, with so many microbes in the mix, right?) So, when you crave a mountain of nutrition-empty things, consider that there’s an emotional aspect of “you” who wants them, while there are many aspects of “you” – the physical, biological, mental “you”, that needs other things. Think of the cliché of pregnant women “eating for two:” we’re all eating for trillions.

There’s also a psychological aspect to this: I’m enjoying Richard Schwartz’s No Bad Parts, an excellent introduction to family systems theory in psychology, which is all about the notion that we contain multitudes. It is useful to give a voice to neglected parts of the self, even if one believes there’s some “core self” (a better fit for western psychology than for Buddhist psychology.)

Next time you’re involved in decisionmaking, for yourself or for others, try thinking like a community and see how it feels.

On the Administration of Tough Love

This spring brought in its wings a mountain of work: in addition to my full-time Hastings position, I guest-taught across the bridge at my alma mater, UC Berkeley. I accepted the overload job for various reasons, financial and others, but in addition to the academic joys of being near many old friends (and especially my beloved and admired mentor) and resuming old professional conversations that I enjoy, there were immense athletic joys: every day I was there, after class and office hours, I would revisit my old stomping (splashing?) grounds and swim a good workout on campus. With my favorite facility, Hearst Pool, closed, I sometimes swam in the gorgeous Golden Bear pool, surrounded by a forest and almost always empty, but most of the time I swam at Spieker Pool, the enormous Olympic-sized facility that is home to Cal’s celebrated swimming and diving teams. Oftentimes over the years, when I swam there, the Cal women’s team would be training in adjacent lanes; I was starstruck by all the fantastic athletes I cheered during Olympic games and world championships and concluded that, if I was managing one lap to every two of Missy Franklin’s, then I was not too shabby.

Like many Bay Area swimmers, I had enormous respect for Cal’s legendary champion, Natalie Coughlin; I read her biography, Golden Girl, which highlighted her special working relationship with coach Teri McKeever. Both women rose to prominence on parallel tracks: Natalie earning medal after Olympic medal, Teri becoming the first woman to coach at an Olympic level. In the book, Teri is presented as a thoughtful, considerate coach, who treats Natalie like the adult that she is, by comparison to Natalie’s prior coach at the Terrapins team. Teri is also presented as sensitive to the needs of the teammates as whole young women, often counseling them on personal and interpersonal problems.

Which is why it came as quite a shock to read in the Mercury News and in the OC Register an exposé revealing serious allegations of bullying and abuse against McKeever from several swimmers:

[I]n interviews with SCNG, 19 current and former Cal swimmers, six parents, and a former member of the Golden Bears men’s team portray McKeever as a bully who for decades has allegedly verbally and emotionally abused, swore at and threatened swimmers on an almost daily basis, pressured athletes to compete or train while injured or dealing with chronic illnesses or eating disorders, even accusing some women of lying about their conditions despite being provided medical records by them.

The interviews, as well as emails, letters, university documents, recordings of conversations between McKeever and swimmers, and journal entries, reveal an environment where swimmers from Olympians, World Championships participants and All-Americans to non-scholarship athletes are consumed with avoiding McKeever’s alleged wrath. This preoccupation has led to panic attacks, anxiety, sleepless nights, depression, self-doubt, suicidal thoughts and planning, and in some cases self harm.

Following the publication of the allegations, as the Mercury News reports this morning, Berkeley swimmers walked out on McKeever on this morning’s practice.

I found myself extremely upset at learning all this; it comes in the heels of Mary Cain’s exposé of running coach Alberto Salazar’s abuse (she thoughtfully reflects on her time training with the Nike team in this great episode of the Rich Roll podcast and in this NY Times video.) We are all still collectively reeling from the sexual abuse that Simone Biles and others suffered at the hands of Larry Nassar, and from the neglect–no, dereliction of duty–on the part of their coaches and sports association to offer them any help. These latest scandals brought home the understanding that U.S. coaches and mentors were perpetrating the same horrors as the infamous Romanian and Russian coaches. Which, as someone who teaches and mentors people at these age brackets (young adults), makes me wonder – what is the meaning, or the purpose, or the appropriate concoction, of tough love?

It’s hardly disputable that the current generation of young students/trainees/athletes have a strong culture of bringing into the light things that previous generations believed should be suffered in silence. I found this interesting article about the attributes of Gen Zers as students instructive and useful. This trait, of not tolerating abuse/indignity, has both lights and shadows. At its worst, it creates a grievance mentality that encourages people to marinate in their traumas and difficulties without fostering the resilience they need (and that previous generations seemed to possess to a greater degree) to overcome them. But at its best, it makes some of us older folks question whether we should have spoken up, rather than remain silent when we suffered similar or worse harm at the hands of the people who were supposed to teach or mentor us.

As I write this, I vividly remember a whole litany of small and medium-sized cruelties that were inflicted on me during my youth and adolescence, starting with my school’s ignorance/inaction at the sadistic and systematic bullying experiences I went through between the ages of 9 and 14, continuing with the terrifying and inhospitable (albeit publicly admired and celebrated) professors and intellectuals who taught us in law school, and then with the gallery of commanders and trainers who used us, in the army, as their psychological punching bags. If anything, I marvel at the fact that the 1980s and 1990s, when all this happened to me and around me, were years in which we gradually developed sensitivity to sexual harassment, while ignoring all other forms of harassment that were still happening, unopposed, in plain sight. We regarded all that stuff as rites of passage and fodder for our hindsight comedy about the hazing we received. The thing to do, our boomer parents taught us on the rare occasion that we revealed our unhappiness to them, was to laugh it off and develop tougher skins. And I can’t say that this advice was completely misguided: later in life, when a staff member at Hastings raised her voice at me about some administrative matter or other, I calmly replied, “Girlfriend, I have been yelled at by people much scarier than you, so I propose you lower your voice and think twice about opening your mouth again.” For me, the experience of suffering was also a gateway toward empathy and compassion: I have never been incarcerated, isolated, or on death row, and I’ve never been assaulted in prison or neglected medically, but I sure as hell know what it’s like to be lonely, hated, disbelieved, and frightened, and I feel kinship with anyone who has shared this ember of the human experience, even if superficially their lives look very different to mine. At 10 years old, I wrote in my diary, “because of what is being done to me, I vow to spend a lifetime helping the helpless and the weak against the powerful bullies.” And I hope my life’s work delivers on at least some of this promise.

Perhaps my ability to grow a useful, and hopefully beautiful, lotus out of the mud comes from sheer good fortune: I just lucked into being genetically predisposed toward happiness and high energy and into having strong psychological muscles. Surely, at least some of my fellow Gen Xers may have emerged psychologically bruised from the roughness with which so many of us were handled. This makes me wonder whether the appearance that the Gen Zers we teach seem considerably more anxious, depressed, and psychologically brittle than us has more to do with their willingness to open up and report about their struggles than with their personalities. But it also has to do with the planetary anxiety (climate crisis, financial crises, political endgame horrors, soul crushing school shooting tragedies) that has characterized their formative years. Either way, the fact is that many of us teachers and mentors encounter young folks who struggle with very powerful demons–depression, anxiety, and others–and that raises serious questions about the extent to which great results can be coaxed out of people through “tough love.”

It’s important not to confuse “tough love” with an uncompromising approach to achievement, or even excellence. I staunchly believe that, by lowering standards, we are misguidedly providing a disservice to the people we try to help. I’ve seen this operate not only in my law school teaching, but also at Balboa Pool, where I work as a lifeguard. Some of my fellow lifeguards teach the Red Cross swim curriculum and are very adamant not to pass children to the next level unless they demonstrate having actually acquired the necessary skills. “They are taking my class,” said one of my colleagues, “not so that their parents will like me, but so that they will know how to swim,” which is not some fancy unimportant frivolous accomplishment: it is an essential lifesaving skill. When the big wave comes for you, you either swim or you don’t. Providing you with the feel-good illusion that can perform a task when you actually cannot is not helping you go forward in life. Similarly, giving you a diploma and a license to practice law when you are incapable of solving other people’s problems with knowledge and confidence is doing a disservice not only to you, but to your clients.

The issue I’m tackling here is quite different: it’s not so much about the standards but about the path toward achieving them. It looks like, at least in athletics (and perhaps in law schools – remember Prof. Kingsfield?) there is a dying breed of old-school coaches and instructors who strongly believe that the way to greatness–Olympic medals, world records, you name it–necessarily requires “toughening people up” through being mean to them. I find myself agnostic: surely some level of toughness and resilience is an important quality to cultivate in people who are aiming at performing and achieving at a high level. But does this really extend to a need to insult and humiliate? The public belittling and verbal punching doesn’t seem to produce the right results in this generation, but did it really prove successful in previous generations? Or did people like Natalie Coughlin, Dana Vollmer, and others accomplish incredible feats despite–rather than because–an atmosphere of toughness and abuse? Could it be that the successful folks were not the one on whose heads the cruelty was rained?

If, with the exposés of Salazar, McKeever, and others, the breed of “tough love” or just “tough” coaches is dying, we certainly have not done enough thinking on whether, and how, to get great results without the great cruelties and indignities. If it is possible, then what is the best model for this? I was very lucky to have, in grad school, the mentorship of Malcolm Feeley, who never once mistreated me, always regarded me as his protégé and friend, and always shone in my skies like a good fatherly sun. To this day I can always count on his steady guiding hand and good advice, and if I have achieved anything in my professional life, it was because, rather than despite, his infinite generosity and kindness. So I know that it can be done, and if a Malcolm-esque model of mentoring could be scaled up to athletics, the world would be better. This, of course, assumes that there’s nothing unique to sports that requires that cruelty be added to the cocktail of instructive styles and methods.

But let’s assume, for a dark teatime of the soul, that it does. Let’s assume that the medals and world records and all that are fueled, to some extent, by the cruelty. That there’s some demonstrable correlation between calling people names and publicly humiliating them and these same people running or swimming very fast and winning races. Do we really care about results so much that we are willing to accept any method for achieving them? Perhaps we’re not there yet. As my friend Aatish suggested in a conversation about this today, “the spectacle demands the next record being broken. No one is going to be all like – oh hey, it’s cool that the mile times will all get slower because now we’re being more ethical.”

And perhaps the same question applies to law school. In the above-linked piece that defends Prof. Kingsfield, Michael Vittielo writes, “Few commentators have asked whether law students are as well prepared today as they were thirty years ago, now that they graduate from far more student-friendly law schools, or whether they are less cynical if they attend law schools where their professors solicit their personal views.” If empirical evidence an be provided that law students are less well prepared now than they were in those rough Socratic method years–can it still be said, “okay, but we’re willing to sacrifice some preparation/proficiency because we don’t want to publicly humiliate our students anymore”?

A strange analogy comes to mind. During the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Speedo pioneered a techsuit called the LZR racer, which was proven statistically to have contributed to the many world records that were broken in the pool. Now, when looking at the record book, all records and results achieved by a swimmer wearing a LZR racer are marked with asterisks. If the analogy isn’t clear, let me spell it out. As more and more evidence of cruelty toward and neglect of young people in sports coaching surfaces, and as more and more of us find it abhorrent and unconscionable to treat people this way even if it produces results, will there ever come a time in which records accomplished partially as a consequence of humiliation and abuse will be marked with an asterisk for posterity, and will no longer be an accomplishment we are willing to tolerate?

Sherlock Holmes Revisited: Re-Creative Reading

A couple of years ago I took a facilitator training in VTS (Visual Thinking Strategies), a nuanced and inclusive way of looking at and speaking about art. At the training, we learned to facilitate conversations about art among students of all ages, brought about by complex, ambiguous images. The power of VTS lies in the simplicity of the method. The students are asked three questions: (1) What is going on in this picture? (2) What do you see that makes you say that? and (3) What more can we find? The facilitator then skillfully rephrases what the students say, clearing their perspectives of preconceptions, and opening the door to a multiplicity of interpretations.

Because these questions are not rooted in any preconceived notions about the art, they open the enjoyment of art and the meaning-making process to a variety of audiences of all ages, from police officers to medical students. Not only does this method subtly encourage inclusivity and pluralism without shaming, but it also increases powers of observation and interpretive flexibility.

One of the many things that are interesting about VTS is that there are many layers of engagement with art. Abigail Housen, whose research informed much of the VTS approach, identifies five stages of aesthetic development:

Stage 1 – Accountive
Accountive viewers are storytellers. Using their senses, memories, and personal associations, they make concrete observations about a work of art that are woven into a narrative. Here, judgments are based on what is known and what is liked. Emotions color viewers’ comments, as they seem to enter the work of art and become part of its unfolding narrative.

Stage 2 – Constructive
Constructive viewers set about building a framework for looking at works of art, using the most logical and accessible tools: their own perceptions, their knowledge of the natural world, and the values of their social, moral and conventional world. If the work does not look the way it is supposed to, if craft, skill, technique, hard work, utility, and function are not evident, or if the subject seems inappropriate, then these viewers judge the work to be weird, lacking, or of no value. Their sense of what is realistic is the standard often applied to determine value. As emotions begin to go underground, these viewers begin to distance themselves from the work of art.

Stage 3 – Classifying
Classifying viewers adopt the analytical and critical stance of the art historian. They want to identify the work as to place, school, style, time and provenance. They decode the work using their library of facts and figures which they are ready and eager to expand. This viewer believes that properly categorized, the work of art’s meaning and message can be explained and rationalized.

Stage 4 – Interpretive
Interpretive viewers seek a personal encounter with a work of art. Exploring the work, letting its meaning slowly unfold, they appreciate subtleties of line and shape and color. Now critical skills are put in the service of feelings and intuitions as these viewers let underlying meanings of the work what it symbolizes emerge. Each new encounter with a work of art presents a chance for new comparisons, insights, and experiences. Knowing that the work of art’s identity and value are subject to reinterpretation, these viewers see their own processes subject to chance and change.

Stage 5 – Re-Creative
Re-creative viewers, having a long history of viewing and reflecting about works of art, now willingly suspend disbelief. A familiar painting is like an old friend who is known intimately, yet full of surprise, deserving attention on a daily level but also existing on an elevated plane. As in all important friendships, time is a key ingredient, allowing Stage 5 viewers to know the ecology of a work — its time, its history, its questions, its travels, its intricacies. Drawing on their own history with one work in particular, and with viewing in general, these viewers combine personal contemplation with views that broadly encompass universal concerns. Here, memory infuses the landscape of the painting, intricately combining the personal and the universal.

As we saw at our facilitator training, the vast majority of people who look at art make observations that reflect stages 1 and 2–which is not to say that they are limited, or uninteresting; plenty of deep observations can emerge from these stages. Stage 3 typically reflects prior knowledge in art history or technique, whereas Stage 4 reflects a deeply intimate and emotional relationship with the art. Stage 5, we were told, typically reflects viewers of advanced ages, who have had the experience of engaging with a particular work of art over the course of their lives, which entwines the evolving personal experiences of the viewers with the universal (and possibly changing) themes of the work.

Today I had the luxury of revisiting Housen’s important work by experiencing what re-creative enjoyment of art looks like in the realm of literature: I read Ruth Wilson’s wonderful book The Jane Austen Remedy. To get a sense of Wilson’s project, here she describes it in her own words:

In my eighties I reappraised Jane Austen’s fiction in a doctoral thesis, and was commissioned to explore my own identity, dispositions and values in a recently published reading memoir.

Now I find that the processes of rereading, investigation and reflection have led me to the best time in my life. Reading memoirists raised issues in my mind about memory, truth telling and artistry. In weaving together these aspects of my own reading experiences in my thesis, I discovered parts of myself and aspects of my most intimate relationships that I had not previously explored.

On the one hand I felt removed sufficiently to take stock of the best and worst of times in my life. And on the other, I became deeply immersed in the reflective process. I was surprised to realise that longstanding dissatisfactions were evaporating around me. I was experiencing waves of exhilaration while my level of wellbeing soared beyond anything I had previously known. While writing the memoir, reading, writing, and rereading occupied my days and gave them added meaning.

Wilson wrote her doctoral dissertation on the experience of reading Austen as promoting empathy in her mid-80s. She devotes a chapter to each novel, unpacking the relevance of themes to her own life and to universal issues and exposing layers of understanding and relevance that have evolved throughout her repeated engagement with the texts in her life. In that sense, Wilson’s appreciation of Austen’s body of work is the literary equivalent of Housen’s fifth stage of aesthetic appreciation.

To my delight and nourishment, I am finding that the same is true for me as I reengage again with texts I have read and loved throughout my life: Arthur Conan Doyle’s canon of Sherlock Holmes stories. I already shared here that this is likely going to be my next book project. I’m finding layers of personal and professional meaning that was added to the stories throughout the years. In my childhood–I first encountered the stories when I was ten years old–I found the deductive process intoxicating, particularly when demystified as a scientific series of steps. But over the years, I learned more about this. My criminological education and my richer background in law and the social sciences highlighted other themes: the centrality of the positivist criminological paradigm in the Holmesian universe, understandable given the period’s great excitement about the scientific method, the measurability of social facts, and the medicalization of crime (the inspiration for Holmes was Doyle’s mentor, Dr. Joseph Bell.) This brought out of the shadows some of the more unsavory aspects of the stories: the racism, misogyny, colonial paternalism, social Darwinism, etc., which are highlighted throughout the canon. This critique is much more salient to me now than it was earlier in life, but I can unearth more layers beneath and above it: the understanding of the fear of crime as an unknown/unexplainable phenomenon that might become just a bit less unruly if we can subdue it to the laws of nature. I see the same animus behind the current tendency, for example, to unfairly blame Chesa Boudin for everything that is wrong in the dystopian San Francisco zeitgeist.

There are other readings of the text that have spoken to me over the years. As I grew up and acquired experiences–ranging from sublime to heart-shattering–with various affaires-de-coeur, queer readings of the Holmes canon, especially understandings of his relationship with Watson, became salient as possibilities. Then, inspired by my colleague and friend Ethan Leib’s work on friendships, I began to wonder what was more revolutionary: to ascribe sexual meaning to a relationship that is ostensibly portrayed as platonic and friendly, or to ascribe this relationship intimate importance despite the lack of an explicit sexual aspect? It is a complicated friendship, which includes true love, professional camaraderie, and on occasion, shocking emotional abuse, that brings to the surface themes that we generally are happy to explore in romantic liaisons but do not deeply analyze in platonic friendships, and in that sense brings a revolutionary aspect to the book.

And then there is my own move to the new world and the colonialist reading of what America, and Americans, is/are all about; Doyle’s exoticization of both America and Australia evoke some interesting parallels in American Political Development (APD) and in the USian tendency to exoticize the Global South. This becomes especially salient in novels and books describing the frontier, including The Valley of Fear, A Study in Scarlet, The Boscombe Valley Mystery, The Noble Bachelor, and others.

In short, much of the canon, like the Austen canon, is not just about the work itself, but also about the ongoing relationship, over decades, between the work and the reader, themes constantly sharpening and blurring, progressing and receding in importance, as my relationship with the inhabitants of 221B Baker Street deepens. I feel it’s time to write about this interplay and to celebrate this canon, especially because, as opposed to Jane Austen’s works, it was meant to be read serially, in the Strand newspaper, by people of all walks of life, each of whom would project their own interests and values on the narrative.

Lifeguarding Debut

This week I started working at my new side hustle: I’m volunteering as a lifeguard at my local pool to acquire the requisite experience hours for a salaried lifeguard job with the city. I’m happy to report that I’m finding it just as exhilarating and rewarding as I expected.

Every job has discontents, and professional jobs are cushier than many other occupations, which makes whining about academia trite and tiresome. Still, the last few years have eroded much of what I enjoyed about my academic work environment, and finding myself in a new professional context was refreshing. I like the fact that people are measured and judged in a more straightforward, honest way on a job that involves a fitness/alertness component. I like the fact that the job is completely stripped of markers of prestige (I work alongside people of all ages, occupations, and walks of life.) But mostly, I’m immensely enjoying the service aspect of the job.

Lifeguarding offers a sublime combination of calm and focus. I sit by the water, which has always been my favorite place, and find a precious balance between the stillness of being of quiet service to people and the alertness to things that might happen before they happen. Empathy and perspective-taking are relevant to the job in surprising ways – most of the time one can prevent all kinds of calamities and crises not through heroic water rescues and CPR, but through anticipating what might happen, putting oneself in the place of a swimmer or exerciser, and preempting the problem by addressing their needs. The job offers varied avenues for service: lowering some of our senior swimmers to the water in a special chair, offering a toy to a kid, politely but efficiently moving people along lanes so that they are swimming with people at their speed, offering an aspiring triathlete a couple of pointers about their stroke. I’m really having a terrific time.

Omicron, Sirhan Parole Denial, Academic/Activist Exhaustion: Four Thoughts

  1. Denying parole to aging, infirm people at this moment in time is… maddening. Several journalist friends called me yesterday about Gov. Newsom’s reversal of Sirhan Sirhan’s parole grant. Anyone who has read Yesterday’s Monsters will guess I am not surprised–in fact, I predicted this outcome, which was foreshadowed in his no-on-recall campaign, on this very blog. Just as with Leslie Van Houten’s parole bid, the fifty-year cling to political and optical considerations is jarring: fully rehabilitated people, advanced in years and presenting no risk to society, confined during a time of pandemic spike in prisons, to which they are especially vulnerable because of their age. Maddening but unsurprising. I think I’ve said it all so many times–what more is there to say?
  2. They worried about staff shortages b/c of vaccine mandate. They got staff shortages b/c of COVID. Yes, Omicron in prisons and jails clearly shows that we have learned nothing. But there is one new factor in this wave: a massive infection spike among the staff. Take a look at CDCR’s employee COVID ticker: as of this morning, there are 4,419 staff cases. Most facilities have more than 100 sick staff. Recall that the opposition to Judge Tigar’s vaccine mandate–in CCPOA’s appeal, the Governor’s supporting brief, and the Ninth Circuit’s decision to stay the mandate–was that vaccine requirements could lead to mass resignations and a difficulty in staffing prisons. I’m assuming that the irony of having to staff prisons when the staff sickens by droves is completely lost on everyone, so I feel compelled to flag it: for exactly the reasons CDCR and CCPOA state, it is impossible to run a prison in which wide swaths of the staff knowingly render themselves potentially unable to work. If allowing medically irresponsible decisionmaking among employees is a priority, something must give–and the obvious corollary (I’m so tired of saying this again and again) is: we must incarcerate far fewer people than we do because we cannot provide minimal, constitutionally compliant care for them under current circumstances.
  3. No good deed goes unpunished #1. Everyone in academia is exhausted, worn, burned out, just like yours truly. As in Tolstoy’s opening for Anna Karenina, there are infinite variations to the unhappiness, but the aggregate effect is the same: people trying to keep afloat by teaching their classes and having no bandwidth for anything else. I’m experiencing this on both sides: solicitations to review, to participate in panels, to assess grants, to do this or that, are flooding my inbox and I’m overwhelmed, just like everyone else. At the same time, as the book review editor for Law & Society Review, I’m finding it difficult to get reviewers and, when I do, the reviews arrive late or not at all. I get it. I really, truly do. The effort to keep the giant machine grinding beyond the essential components of the job, in the face of all THIS, is bewildering. It occurred to me that one way to help a little bit would be to compensate (not lavishly, but reasonably) for people’s efforts in this direction. Peer reviewing an article? Cash. Supervising a student’s independent work? Cash. Heavy-load committee? Cash. Panel appearance requiring preparation? Cash. This would be especially wonderful for the folks who are trying to write their way out of adjuncting while teaching at several institutions. Many of us, even in these high-prestige occupations, suffered a financial blow; many of us have spouses who had to quit or restructure their jobs to provide childcare, or have had to do that ourselves. Money is important in itself–it’s how we afford our lives–and it would also signal some recognition and gratitude for our efforts.
  4. No good deed goes unpunished #2. Speaking of lack of recognition and gratitude, this morning’s L.A. Times features the story of Patrisse Cullors, one of the national leaders of Black Lives Matter, who had to quit her position and regain her mental health in the face of threats from without and incessant critique from within that made her life a misery. I’m in a variety of activist scenes because of my work and I know exactly what she’s talking about. There is something very unhealthy, very rotten, in how we manage interpersonal relationships in activist spaces, and the unbearable ease of vomiting negativity and mobbing people on social media is enough to break anyone’s spirit. I would really like to create a sanctuary for exhausted activists and advocates–a place where people can come refresh their spirits and take care of themselves. Our movements for change will not survive if we continue treating each other like trash.

Health and Fitness Update

Back in July, when I wrote this, I was so touched to receive an enormous amount of support from friends and colleagues; my journey back to health was even featured in this Q&A piece, in which I said:

My health has deteriorated in a serious, serious way in the course of my work. I made a few key decisions during the pandemic, one of which was to put my health first, because that is what allows me to help other people. Of course, I’m speaking from an extremely fortunate place — I don’t have a loved one behind bars, my family is well, and academics largely kept our jobs.

At the same time, if you are fortunate, the temptation is to say, well, worrying about my stress is a bit precious and other people have it much worse. Which is of course true, but stress is real and it can kill you. There is a mounting pressure that results from having multiple conversations every day with people that are telling you about horrific things happening in the world. To keep your own resilience and your own little torch of hope lit so you can speak for them is extremely important.

I’ve taken steps to repair my health and it’s gotten much better. Now, I analyze: What is the optimal contribution I can make in this situation? Which contribution will advance the movement the farthest without making me sick or making my loved ones suffer? Talking for the sake of hearing yourself talk or having a clever soundbite on Twitter is not useful. This is not where the real suffering is happening, and it is not where the real improvement will happen. During the pandemic, many of us learned this is not where we will be of service.

I’m not Christian, but one of my favorite spiritual scriptures is the Prayer of St. Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.” I like to wake up and think, Okay, how can I be an instrument of God’s peace today? What’s the best way for me to do that, without my ego, my stuff, or infighting getting in the way?

COVID has exposed a lot of our failures — the problems in our educational systems, in our healthcare systems, the travesty of how we treat people in our prisons. We have also seen each other’s resilience and compassion.

At the turn of the new year, I got a “Season’s Greetings” postcard from prison on which someone wrote, “Thank you for being our voice. We so appreciate it.” I was happy that people inside know we are trying to help. But I also just thought about the fact that this person is living in what is essentially purgatory, yet he is still extending me kindness and grace. It’s absolutely stunning.

Many of the people leading this movement—for instance, in the Stop San Quentin Outbreak Coalition—have just been released. You would think a person getting out of prison would want to find a place to live, get a job, and start repairing their relationships. Some of these people have been out of society and away from their families for decades. But they immediately roll up their sleeves and work for the friends they left behind. How beautiful is that? You build on that work, and it helps you keep going.

Since I know many of us are on a similar path, trying to put their physical and mental health on an upward trajectory after several very difficult years, I thought I’d demystify my process in case it is helpful to others.

As Simon Hill shows in his new book The Proof Is In the Plants, a whole-foods, plant-based diet is optimal not only for your health, but for animal welfare and for our planet. I’ve been vegan for a long time, but in the last few years, what with the stresses of parenting, working full-time, and fighting the Trump Administration on the media almost as a full-time job, I slid toward relying on over-processed, starchy foods. In March 2021, when I awakened to the realization that I deserved a better life, I transitioned to eating exclusively whole foods. I now drink green juice or a smoothie for breakfast, eat a big salad for lunch, and a vegetable stew, soup, and/or stir-fry for dinner. For treats, I enjoy fruit, attractively sliced vegetables, and decaf green tea lattes on oat milk. I found out that I don’t need nearly as much food as I’d been eating. The return to working in person has made this a little more challenging, but it is doable with a bit of planning. We batch-cook beans, lentils, and grains on weekends, and use them during the week in various forms. I especially focus on consuming an enormous amount of leafy greens, which is very easy in smoothies, juices and salads.

The exercise journey started with a daily walk, and in many ways that’s still the foundation of what I do – I walk at least 10,000 steps a day. I gradually tacked on more things; in addition to walking/running every day, I now swim five times a week (Tue through Sat) in various city pools (I’ll sometimes walk to a distant pool and get my walking and swimming done that way) and cycle to work on an e-bike every day (Mon through Fri.) On Saturday I take a Pilates session, which has been complementary and informative, and on Sunday I usually go for a long run. I make my exercise regime a top priority of my day and never let a day pass without doing something, even though pool closures and weather sometimes require revising my plans. If it rains heavily and the pool is closed, I walk inside my house on a cheap mini-stairclimber.

Even though my time has become very limited with the return to in-person classes, I still meditate and listen to calming music before falling asleep. I don’t sleep much (who does with a little kid and a full-time job?) but I try to at least get some refreshing peace of mind in the form of religiously separating work life from home life. I aspire to stop working at 6pm daily and never work on weekends (despite being repeatedly pressured to do so, both directly and passive-aggressively.)

All of this eats a considerable chunk of my weekly schedule, as you can imagine, but I’ve come to see nutrition and exercise as essential steps for keeping the organism in good working order. When I fall off the wagon (a pox on you, Halloween candy!) I feel the consequences immediately, and it motivates me to get back on track.

As to the consequences: The flashier news are that I’ve lost 60 lbs, landing me at my high-school weight; dropped 30 points off my resting heart rate; boosted my good cholesterol and other markers, yielding spectacular bloodwork according to my doctor; and acquired a good muscle mass, agility, and flexibility, which has helped me improve in all the sports I do. Years ago, I used to swim marathons in open water; I found that multisport is kinder on my late-forties body, and my splits in the pool are as fast as they were when I was swimming for hours every day. A month ago I astonished myself with a 2:19:58 finish at a half-marathon. My weakest sport is still the bike, and I’ve had to start small–logging some time in the saddle by commuting on my beloved e-bike. The hope is that I can improve my fitness, and especially my cycling, enough to make myself proud next June at the Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon. But none of these things capture the most important aspect of health improvement, which is the constant, indescribable sensation of wellbeing that imbues my entire day. It is hard to overestimate the exquisite feeling of tackling one’s day with a body humming with healthy vibrations and free of malaise. I feel so good that I always want to feel this way, and I want this for everyone else, too.

As to the mental health piece of all this, it has been a real challenge tuning out some of the less savory aspects of higher education. In many ways this is a wonderful job for me, and the independence and flexibility are precious and valuable. But the climate of higher education has changed, introducing an enormous amount of administrative burdens, duties to contribute to a “shadow curriculum” beyond my areas of expertise, and panics and fears of upsetting or running afoul of campus orthodoxies, which rob me of my peace of mind. None of these trends show any signs of abating, and I have to come to terms with the fact that one of my most treasured aspects of the job–the freedom to say what I think and exchange ideas with people who can respectfully disagree–has eroded to a great degree. I try to remind myself that every job has its discontents and that, overall, I have been very fortunate in getting my career to a place where I can be of service to others, most recently our fellow Californians behind bars battling COVID-19, medical neglect, institutional ineptitude and political indifference. Finding peace and satisfaction at work is my ongoing project for 2022 and beyond, and I find that two things help enormously: being in my body and experiencing nature. These somatic experiences have a unique quality of cutting through intellectual noise and indulgent storytelling, as well as dissolving the ego piece of the whole thing, and provide even more motivation for keeping the exercise piece of the puzzle regular and fresh.

Some of the things that I have found inspiring and helpful on this journey are:

As I’ve mentioned before, if you are struggling with your own health and need a sounding board, hit me up. I’ll be happy to help you come up with a plan that works for you.

Congratulations! And, It’s Okay to Change Your Mind

Israeli Minister of Transportation and Chair of the Labor Party, Merav Michaeli, and her partner, TV personality Lior Schleien, have a baby boy called Uri. I’m delighted for them!

After a long and unsuccessful IVF journey, Michaeli and Schleien had the kid through a U.S. surrogate. This is not uncommon in Israel, especially among same-sex couples, because adoption is extremely difficult and fraught there (infant adoption is almost impossible.) When they flew to the U.S., Michaeli was deeply criticized by many for leaving the country at a time of rising COVID rates; the trip was perceived as ill-timed and frivolous. Then, they returned and posted about the kid. As is always the case in the New Salem, opinions abound about this in the public square. Let’s summarize them so we can short-circuit the tired tropes: (1) People who criticized her for taking a trip to the U.S. doubling down on their abuse, showing themselves to be troglodytes; (2) people who criticized her now apologizing, showing how repro-centric Israel is and how kids are the great equalizer, mainstreamer, and justification for everything; (3) people digging out Michaeli’s old statements criticizing surrogacy and her lack of desire to have kids; (4) people opining (positively or negatively) about how stodgy and mainstream she has become, assuming that parenting cannot be the scene of anything fresh or revolutionary. I find all of this trite and exhausting, so let’s leave it at that. A delightful couple has a new child and I wish them all the joy in the world!

There’s only one thing I can contribute to this discussion: as I know from my own experience, there are seasons to every life, and it is okay to change one’s mind and life plan as one ages. For the longest time, I did not want kids, and then, gradually, I changed my mind, and now I’m Rio’s mom and I’m happy as can be. I would never pontificate to people who want to be child-free about the truly wonderful and rich experience of being a parent. It is everyone’s prerogative to do what they wish with their one wild and precious life. So I’ll just whisper in your ear, like a friend: This path is open to you, and it is perfectly okay for you to change your mind, or not. Listen to the gentle breeze blowing within yourself and see whether you can find within an unpressured, unhurried desire to be a parent. It’s for you to decide whether you want to answer that call and in what way. There are many ways to bring nurturing, loving, teaching, mentoring energy into your life, be it through your own kid–biological or not–or other kids or adults. Just stay attuned to the seasons of your soul and they will not lead you astray.

Applying Lessons from Circle Swimming to Prison Advocacy

The number of letters, emails, calls, etc., I got after I published this was truly moving overwhelming. It looks like many advocates and activists share a sense of immense exhaustion and feeling unwell and many of us want to get better. For me, as you know, this journey includes total commitment to a whole-food, plant-based diet and to daily outdoor exercise: running, cycling, and swimming. The last of these is the only one at which I’m a veteran; before I semi-retired from the sport in 2016 I was an open water marathon swimmer. These days, for practical reasons (little boy and full-time job=> no time to schlep to the bay, acclimate, and then pour hot tea down my gullet to defrost myself) I swim for no longer than an hour in one of our city pools.

We don’t have many public pools; the ones we have are beautiful and the staff is great, but there is a serious nationwide lifeguard shortage. This means opening hours are extremely limited and the pools get crowded. It’s become rare to have only one person to split a lane with, let alone have the whole lane to yourself. At one of the pools I swim in, there are regularly at least five people to a lane. In the other it’s about three and four. Because these are strangers, not masters teammates, the lanes aren’t calibrated to people’s exact pace, and the fast/medium/slow lane categories are completely arbitrary. Bottom line – I regularly end up in a lane with people who swim either faster or slower than me. Many of the slower folks are delightful people who stop at the pool end to let you pass them, but unfortunately not everyone has the proprioception or the humility to do it. And so, sometimes I get stuck behind folks who really should know better and who make it impossible to pass them (I should say – because I know firsthand the aggravation this causes, when I swim with faster folks I’m hyperconscious of them and let them pass at every opportunity!).

I’ve narrowed the possible coping strategies to five, and some of them are better than others:

  1. Do nothing and fume. Or, do nothing and slap the water in rage, or kick a little extra hard to vent your frustration. This does not help – not at all – and essentially the only person I punish by marinating in my anger over this is myself.
  2. Appeal to higher authorities, namely, to the lifeguards and ask them to reorganize people by lane. This is kind of drastic – I’ve never done it myself nor have I seen it done in city pools. At some private clubs I’ve swum in, the lifeguards are experts on tactfully doing this, but it also carries the frustration of dealing with your problem through third parties rather than practically resolving it yourself.
  3. Change lanes mid-lap and swim back. Here’s how this works: You swim behind the slow person for as long as conceivably possible (to earn yourself some good laps later) and then, right before the wall, shift to the other lane and swim away fast. This obviates the need to confront the other person in any way, and if they are clueless it won’t upset them, either, but you could run into problems confusing the slow swimmer or other swimmers and, in some situations, could be a bit dangerous.
  4. Aggressive mid-lap pass. This is an emergency move, and an undesirable one, but sometimes people don’t leave you much choice. You carefully check if there’s anyone coming toward you in the opposite lane (i.e., that the other swimmers are already behind you) and them quickly shift to the left lane and beat the slow swimmer to the wall. Beyond the obvious risk, this is also a physically aggressive move and I would not be surprised if it upset and scare the slower swimmer.
  5. Confront the person at the wall, either through body language (touch their foot lightly, shift to the middle of the lane to block their turn) or actually say “can I pass?” I’ve never seen anyone manifestly refuse to let another person pass after a confrontation, but for a lot of people who look forward to their pool time as their happy place, it could be several laps before the work out the nerve to do it (now that I think about it, I bet there are cultural differences in pool behavior between different countries).

The wisdom we should all cultivate (I’m working on this myself, yo, so don’t think I’m anywhere close to circle swimming nirvana!) lies in deciding which of the five approaches is appropriate for each situation. For example, I think that option 1 is only good when you have a few minutes of cooldown before your workout is over, and then it’s best to channel your frustrations into working on your butterfly or backstroke or do a couple of leg laps without fins, which slows you down coming into the wall. Option 2 is only good when you’re at a pretty hierarchical or at a pretty expensive facility. As to options 3-5, their desirability depends on who you’re dealing with, and here it’s worth remembering that you don’t actually know the person from Adam, and that behind the cap and goggles, “slow-ass” might actually be a lovely person on whom you’re unfairly projecting the frustrations of your day. It’s quite possible to choose the wrong strategy and add unnecessary stress to what should be a blissful hour for everyone–which is where self-compassion and compassion for others comes in, bigtime.

I think about this stuff a lot when I’m in the water, and a couple of days ago, while discussing this with a friend, I realized that these ways of handling conflict with someone you don’t know have recurred elsewhere in my life, especially in the context of prison advocacy. As I work on our book in progress about COVID-19 in California prisons, I’m realizing that a lot of stuff has been happening, at the state and at the county levels, behind the scenes, and while we were privy to the horrific outcomes of all this through the information we got from our incarcerated friends and family members, we were not exactly privy to the inner workings at CDCR or at the Receiver’s office. We know that they paid no heed to the AMEND report, but did they consult with anyone else? It seemed not from the Quentin litigation, and it seems not from the Plata litigation, but surely not everyone who works there is pure, unadulterated evil, and we need better information about internal disputes and conflicts on how to manage this. We know, for example, that the rank-and-file physicians at Quentin were clamoring to save lives (I’ve spoken to prison workers and many of them are decent, conscientious folks who have had a horrific time for the last year and a half.) We also know that various county jail officials worked extremely hard to make vaccination available to their population (this I know firsthand because they consulted me, and they impressed me as being decent people who were well aware of their responsibilities.) I actually don’t know, and have no way of knowing, whether the top brass at CDCR, CCHCS, and CCPOA sleep well at night. And the problem is that the best approach to getting this pandemic under control as numbers in prison are beginning to rise again depends a great deal on understanding these people and where they come from, and on figuring out how to best work with them, around them, or against them.

Over the course of this struggle, I had some experience doing variations on all of these themes. The litigation, of course, is full of animosity; all the media work, especially the press conferences and the news editions, was also highly confrontational, on purpose. By contrast, I got to collaborate with Orange County officials on producing their vaccine advocacy video because there were people there who were trying, in good faith, to save lives, and it was worth working with them. And in introducing the AMEND FAQ into prisons and our videos recorded by formerly incarcerated folks, we sought to work around CDCR to raise vaccine literacy behind bars by providing sources that our friends and neighbors inside could completely trust–thus working around CDCR (and, to be honest, counting on smuggled cellphones to do the work.)

In order to draw more careful lessons about how I’m going to do advocacy in the future, I need more complete information on which of these strategies worked and which didn’t – and why. For now, I’m providing some help in the form of a wonderful partnership with the Covid in-Custody Project, spearheaded by the unfailingly superb Aparna Komarla (read her recent and worrisome stories on the Davis Vanguard COVID page.) From now on, this blog will host all the data collected by the Covid in-Custody Project at this link, where you can get information about CDCR as well as several jails. Look for a post on resident and staff vaccine rates soon.

My heart is still very much in this battle, even as my body, mind, and spirit needed a health reset–I’m not constantly on twitter or facebook but I still care very much about what’s going on and am figuring out ways in which I can be optimally useful in this fight. In the meantime, if you swim at a city pool, in the name of all that is holy, please let faster swimmers pass you at the wall.

Escaping the Opinion Marketplace

With our refreshing family vacation at Harbin Hot Springs now over, I have a lot to contemplate. The interruption of the constant stream of internet opinions, takes, takes on takes, speechifying, and moralizing was so profound that its effects on my wellbeing were palpable. For the first time in a long time, I found some space to hear my own thoughts and, more importantly, to let them go, like puffy, airy clouds, making room for for sensations and feelings.

Perhaps unfortunately given my line of work, in the last few years I’ve experienced profound exhaustion resulting from the constant bombardment of takes, ideas, and invitations–sometimes quite coercive–to “be a part of the conversation.” I tried writing something about this a few months ago, which focused on the schoolmarmish, admonishing tone of so much of what is written these days by my milieu–academics, journalists, and other opinion people. But I don’t think I managed to capture how oppressive all of this is, how inauthentic.

In her book Our Word Is Our Bond, Marianne Constable analyzes the nature and operation of legal speech, arguing that law operates through the trappings of language. Much of legal education, accordingly, focuses on the minutiae of language and what it implies, constitutively, for the world of policy. I’m not a linguist, and surely this is not a particularly original take on this, but I’m getting the sense that performative, declarative speechifying has now become so commonplace it transcends the world of policy. Everyone is busy declaiming and declaring where they stand on various issues. It seems like the natural counterpart to Citizens United: First we argued that corporations were people, and now people are behaving like corporate PR departments, issuing statements, apologies, excoriations, and the rest. This is all playing out in a few arenas–Facebook, Twitter, Instagram as the main culprits–all of which I vowed to leave when I retire, but waiting another fifteen years to give myself some freedom is too punishing.

Since late March, I’ve been working hard on reclaiming my health, which suffered serious setbacks in the last four years and especially during the pandemic year. While working on the San Quentin case, documenting the COVID-19 disaster in prisons, and advocating on the media and in scholarship, I became seriously inflamed, suffered constant headaches and digestive upsets, put on an enormous amount of weight, ate and slept very poorly. I’m now convinced that I was very close to a heart attack. I can only imagine the deleterious effects this catastrophe had on the health people I talked to and collaborated with–people inside, people recently released with friends inside, family members and loved ones living with the stress of incarceration on the outside.

I’m happy to report I’ve now reversed, and improved, all the health problems I had. I lost 40 lbs and am on my way to losing 15 more and returning to my high school weight. I’m eating a whole-food, plant-based diet rich in vegetables and fruit and exercising daily. My resting heart rate is down from 82 to 57. All my other metrics have been reversed and are now optimal. After a long break from endurance sports, I completed a sprint triathlon last week, scoring a personal best. I continue to run, bike, and/or swim daily, supplementing with pilates and strength training. I am determined to retain my good health, because I know how awful it is to lose it.

One thing I realized at Harbin is that the focus on my family’s happiness and on my own health and wellbeing has a price. It means I haven’t pushed out as many chapters of #FESTER as I perhaps ought to have done (though you can find bits and pieces here, here, and here.) It means I haven’t been aggressively hustling for conferences and travel and vividly engaging with the current conversation on every topic as I would perhaps strive otherwise. A few days ago I gave an interview on the Cosby reversal on NPR and had to actually sit down and read the decision, because I hadn’t been religiously following the takes, let alone supplying takes myself. Given how well I’m feeling and how awful I felt before, I think this is a fair price to pay.

I am reminded of Patty Sun, Andrew Taslitz’s widow, and what she had to say after his untimely death. She wrote:

In the past four months I have kept seeing accolades to Andy’s amazing productivity—the 100+ articles, the zillions of case books, etc., and I have always told people that yes, he led a normal life, yes, he got plenty of sleep and yes, he even took plenty of naps.

But that’s not really true. His life was not normal, at least not to me, and it certainly wasn’t balanced. Yes, I know he genuinely loved his work and yes, I know he had a brilliant and unusual mind, and yes, I know he was cut down in his prime when he still had so much more to give. But all of that came with a price. Not the teaching or the mentoring, but all that scholarship.

So what was the price in the end? In the entire time we were married we only took a two-week vacation once, and just about every vacation we did take was wrapped around one of his conferences or presentations. The furthest he went on each of his two sabbaticals was his front bedroom, because he spent every single day on his manuscripts.

So in the end how do I feel about his productivity? Yes, he enjoyed it, but he also killed himself trying not to disappoint people or to break deadlines.

And as I sit here with the dogs on July 4th, I think was it really that important to add one more book review to his CV or to do one more tenure letter as a favor for someone he never met? I’m glad his peers all loved him for the reliable genius that he was, and I don’t know how he feels wherever he is now, but I am very, very bitter.

Yes, he was a great academic mentor and collaborator, but the price for all that frenzied output was me, and there’s a part of me that will never forgive him for it, because he died right after he promised to slow down and enjoy life itself more.”

I’m taking these words, and the testimony of my own lived experience with improved health, to heart. My bottom line is this: I would like to create a clearing in the dense forest of my life, away from all this chatter, and do as little as possible to clutter my world and yours with more superfluous, unoriginal speechifying. I want to post only what I consider essential and important, stay out of scurrying activity that is not, ultimately, that relevant, and “participate in the conversation” only on my own terms. This is not some glossy, precious wellness flummery. Stress is real, and it can kill you. I won’t have this chatter take me away from my family and from my own body.

This means prioritizing active time–swimming, running, biking, taking dancing, hiking–and time in nature, which I intend to do every day of my life from now on. It also means prioritizing my family over everything and everyone else.

This also means that something else has become important: If you, too, are feeling unwell, stressed, bloated, achy, weepy, exhausted, burnt out, and ready for change, and want to transform your life through a combination of plant-based foods, exercise, and mindfulness, please hit me up on email. I’m a certified mindfulness meditation teacher; I have tons of experience in endurance sports and have taught pilates and aerial fitness; and I have a certificate in plant-based nutrition. More importantly, I know what it is to feel less than your best and how it can rob you from a full participation in your life. Please don’t let this profession, even as you work on noble, important, pressing issues of our time, rob you of your time on Earth. I can help. Let’s talk.

Exhibition Review: I Look for the Sky and Memento at the Asian Art Museum

Yesterday I had a lovely time visiting an old haunt of mine, the Asian Art Museum, and taking in two new exhibitions: Jayashree Chakravarty and Lam Tung Pang’s Memento and Zheng Chongbin’s I Look for the Sky.

Both exhibits are wonderful, each in its own way. Chongbin’s exhibit makes use of the space not only via abstract canvasses on grayscale on huge sheets of calligraphy paper, but also via an impressive light installation. The outside oscillates and strobes, and the inside has a visceral quality that communicated with Buddhist theme of impermanence and the concept of Maransati. Flashes of a skeleton, internal organs, tissues, muscles, bones, appear on the lower screens, while on the upper screens everyday objects flash: a banana, a wicker basket, shoes, a hammer… as Yesterday’s Monsters readers know, I’ve been very interested in the Tibetan Book of the Dead and in the concept of the bardo, and the parade of mundane objects against the viscerality and aesthetic of the perishable body put me in a place of unmediated trance about my own temporality. This is exactly the quality I (misguidedly) looked for in the New Orleans Museum of Death, and it was overpowering here.

Memento was a milder, but no less exciting, artistic experience. Jayashree Chakravarty put on a map (perhaps a heart-guided map, more than an accurate geographic description) of her hometown on a huge composite paper and built a round shelter out of it. It felt exciting to be inside and look around. And Lam Tung Pang did an ingenious installation, which consisted of a big canvas with drawings, illuminated by projectors. In front of the projectors were miniature objects: a little bird on a branch, a man climbing a hill, palm trees. The little objects cast shadows on the canvas at exactly the right places to fit in their right place in the installation. It was beautiful and a reminder that all objects we see are, really, a light reflection of themselves.

I caught a little bit of Videos of Resistance, but not enough to review it. Frankly, what I’ve seen of pandemic-inspired art at SFMOMA and elsewhere was of mixed quality, which is to be expected given the circumstances. But I was delighted to see these wonderful installations. One downside of the amazing new work on the ground floor is that I seldom have time to go upstairs and take in the Asian Art Museum’s excellent permanent collection; however, with Hastings moving toward in-person opening next year, I’ll have an opportunity to go whenever I have a free moment.