One of many projects I have completed of late...

The new lace top I crocheted with my favorite crocheted lorraine lace scarf! Details and pattern information can be found under my "Off the Hook" tab.

Reflecting on Occupy

All I can say is this: that for the last year and change I have crisscrossed this country and seen the impact that our failing economy and irresponsible government has had on the everyday lives of people just like me, older and younger. College students question the value of their education and their future, while seasoned employees find themselves starting all over again. Decreasing tourism in Maui, a surplus of graduates with no jobs in the university city of Boston, unemployment in the Berkshires, are just a few things that I have not only noticed but been influenced by in much the same way as many other Americans, I can't find a job and my student loans are in unemployment deferment. I came down to Alabama to be with family while I figure out my next steps and get back home to Oakland. I learned that my grandmother's social security checks barely cover the most essential of her living expenses. She's been a laundry maid and seen the brutality of the Civil Rights Movement, her late husband was a veteran of the Korean War, but for the first time in her life she is dependent on food stamps and donations from the food bank to make ends meet. She is part of the generation that pinched and saved so that they could have more in retirement but social security is not enough anymore. What does that mean for me? Now, in Birmingham, watching and reading about the Occupy groups gaining momentum across the country, in Maui, Boston, Atlanta, Birmingham, and at my home in Oakland and Berkeley, my travels over the last year have added meaning and familiarity to the unique struggles facing each community across the country. I can't wait to get back to my hometown and show support with my friends and family there. Until then, I am the 99% in Birmingham, Alabama.

 

Alabama

Go back to go forward. Sometimes you have to go back farther than you want to, and then farther again. I've come back to a place that I was from a long time ago. I wasn't born here. I don't know it's geography the way I know the ridges of the Sierras. I don't cherish its groves the way I do the fruit-filled forests of Maui. I don't welcome its humidity the way I do the soft misty fog creeping over the Puget Sound. Because I have never seen its small gulf coast, I am always lost in the lay of its land. I am not proud of this place, but I defend it fiercely. I don't get its religion, but its white chapel churches I honor despite myself. This place holds the people I have dared to forget about and the people I cannot stop loving. The bones of my ancestors - African, Cherokee, Muscogee, French - are moving fossils held in the rock and blood of its geology. I am angry at this land, for if I was not of it, I would never think of it. If I was not of it, I could pretend to love it. I am in this place now, breathing its soul in... and oh the truths I've learned, the secrets I've inherited, the pains I've sung, and the laughs I've ached out with tears. What a painful treasure this place is. A secret, smelling of sweet gum trees and steel furnaces, whose existence is mighty, whose history is majestic, whose truth pushes me onward boldly into a life I am no longer afraid of living.

Copyright 2011