MEETINGS

A black woman and a white, Jewish woman meet at a cafe. Quite a revolutionary thing considering they live in a horribly segregated state. For two months they've gone back and forth through hairy-canary schedules to come up with a viable date. The black woman considers cancelling -- there's always so much to do--but she goes along, re-organizing the day to fit in the meeting. The place is crowded more than the black woman thought it would be, always a problem for someone who prefers solitude. The black woman immediately wonders, what will come of this meeting?, for this is the first time she's met the person she's only known online thus far. The white woman gives her a warm hug, as if they've known each other all along.

They talk and eat and eat and talk and talk with their mouthes full of what they've eaten. Not a pretty picture for people who don't know each other, you think? The white woman asks how long the black woman has lived there and the black woman, staring out the window, imagining herself someplace far away (read: San Francisco) replies, "Nine long years." The black woman explains all that she despises about the place and compares it to her hometown, New York City. Ahh, to be there again, amidst the lights, the sounds, the theatre, the food, the action, the Spirit ....
she's so unhappy here, in this Big Little Town.

"Oh, but of course," the white woman says, "as long as you keep comparing it to New York, you'll never be happy. You have to find the good that's here." They talk and they talk about the black woman's writings and her endeavors. The white woman gives the black woman a list of books she's read, scribbled on a scraggly sheet of paper. They talk about Buddhism as a way of life and the white woman says, "Shambhala changed my life." They part and the black woman feels the stares as she moves through the crowd -- mostly from the few other black women. Hard to believe but it is indeed odd to see this kind of pairing where they are. But the black woman remembers how often she had these kinds of pairings back home, in New York, and no-one ever gave her a second glance. She exhales deeply as she heads home.

But for the next few days the black woman meditates on what the white woman said: a woman she's only known through a set of tangled wires and a keyboard. She thinks and thinks and thinks, turns the words over and under in her palm and comes to a solid conclusion:

Sometimes you gotta bloom where you're planted. You gotta know, from the depths of your being, that where you are now is just a readying place for the next step and that the Creator, holder of Infinite Wisdom, would not have you here if there were not something you needed to get, give, or learn. You gotta reach out against circumstances and BE the change you want to see. When the road left looks as jacked up as the road right, you gotta learn how to cut a new path. In this society that tries to keep us focused on differences (especially race and religion) sometimes you just gotta see that we all do have something to give and get; that sometimes life wisdom and the messages you need to get come from places you least expect. Perhaps the problem of the 21st century and every century thereafter WILL be the color line as W.E.B. Dubois said but we certainly don't have to get tangled in it.

Something to think about.


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This past weekend I led my first Creativity workshop, something I've wanted to do for a long time but for too many reasons to post here, reasons deeply personal, I hadn't. It went amazingly well, with positive reinforcement from the participants to keep it going. In addition to all that needs to be done, here I am pulling together notes I've travelled the past 15 years with and writing a creativity manual for the next session.

Also, I picked up two wonderful books over the weekend, one by
SARK called Succulent Wild Woman (I love SARK) and another by Clarrisa Estes, called Women Who Run With The Wolves -- an amazing book that rode on the wings of the NYT Bestseller List for two years.

---A.