Moments of Insight • Vol. 1 Issue 9 • July 10, 2020
A Note from Anna, our Founder & Director Send us a Letter We know we cannot be there in person with you, but wanted to encourage you Hi everyone, to check-in with us like we do when we are together. You know how Anna I hope you are doing well and are able to find some space to relax and feel usually asks us to state how the week some inner peace. I’m good. Been in my head some this week trying to nail has been and share something we've the last of the Insight to Well-being curriculum so we can train more learned? We'd love for you to write it teachers and expand into more prisons. down and send us a note.
I’ve been watching a British show recently called ‘I May Destroy You’. It sounds more ominous than it is… It centers around a British woman, her Send us a poem or artwork struggles and her life as a writer trying to make it all work in London. The We would also love for you to share any lead role is played by Michaela Cole, a young woman who grew up in East poems, artwork or insights you've had London. that we can include in one of our next volumes of 'Moments of Insight'. Feel 'I didn’t think much more about it until I read an article about her, written by free to share ideas of what you'd like us Alex Jung for the New York Times Magazine titled, ‘Michaela Cole: to include in this newsletter as well. How a young talent from East London went from open-mic nights to making the most sublimely unsettling show of the year'. This brilliant piece invited All letters, art and ideas can be sent to: me into a deeper understanding of who she is and where she comes from. It The Insight Alliance showed me, once again, that anyone can do anything they put their mind to. PO Box 820214 And we don’t know what's possible until we dip our toe into the unknown: Portland, OR 97282
“ …When Michaela was in drama school it was the first time she had ever been in an environment full of upper-middle-class white people (“middle- uppers,” as she wrote on the blog). She began to understand that her classmates saw her as someone who lacked, but it also made her realize she had an advantage. “The way I looked at myself and my life shifted,” she says. “I’ve never had a garden. We never grew up like that. I don’t particularly mind, but I think there is something in growing up in concrete and not understanding putting fingers in soil, growing things, foundation. My family has rented our whole lives. You’re always on fragile ground because it’s not yours. It gives you a drive, an ambition, because nothing is certain. That is a resilience no person with stability can replicate…There’s blessings to the struggle.”
THE INSIGHT ALLIANCE PAGE 01 CONTINUED FROM PG 1. What I loved in reading this is the creativity that is born from her struggle. It’s inspiring and gutsy. When she was in negotiation with Netflix, they said they would pay her $1 million for the show but give her no royalties and she'd have to hand it over. But she wasn’t having it. She knew she was worth more. So she kept going. She wanted some ownership. So she walked away. Then a bit later Michaela was the keynote speaker at a big media industry celebration. She surprised people by openly and directly sharing her experience of being undervalued and marginalized as a creator. Piers Wenger, the controller of BBC drama commissioning had this reaction:
“She’s this thing that we all say we want most, which is this cool young woman of color, who happens to be a fantastic writer — the joke Holy Grail of modern television. And here she was, talking about what a shit time she’d had,” says Wenger, the controller of BBC drama commissioning. “It was pretty hard to hear because we’ve been complicit, myself included. That was an incredibly ballsy thing to do to stand up and say, ‘This is what I need. Are you good enough to give it to me?’ Not ‘Am I good enough to deserve the kind of treatment that I want?’ ” And as it turned out she ended up doing her show with the BBC and they gave her everything she wanted.
When we think outside the box and go for things we haven’t tried before, or aren’t sure are even possible, we throw ourselves into the celestial soup of the unknown. The creative potential of the ‘shit we don’t know we don’t know.’ It can be a fun place to hang out. It’s where hope lives. It's our Well of LOVE AFTER LOVE Being. And, it's what we're all made of. BY DEREK WALCOTT
Hope to see you soon, The time will come when, with elation You will greet yourself arriving At your own door, in your own mirror. And each will smile at the others welcome And say, sit there, eat, You will love again the stranger Who was yourself Give wine, give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger Who has loved you All your life, who you have ignored For another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters From the book shelves The photographs, the desperate notes. Peel your own image from the Mirror. Sit feast on your life.
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I read an article from the Veterans The BREATHE Act ART BY BRUSHFIREHEART.ART The BREATHE Act is presented by the Electoral Justice Project of the Movement for Black Lives. This visionary bill invests in a new vision of public safety—a vision that answers the call to defund the police and allows all communities to finally BREATHE free. This act would:
1. Directly make changes to the Federal criminal- justice system,including changes to the policing, prosecution, sentencing, and jailing practices that have disproportionately criminalized Black and Brown communities, LGBTQIA+ people, Indigenous people, and disabled people. Three examples of specific changes include: Eliminating surveillance tactics that are disproportionately used to target Black, Brown, and Muslim communities by prohibiting predictive policing, racial recognition technologies, drones, and similar tools; Abolishing mandatory minimum sentencing laws; Abolishing the “three strikes” law
2. Investing in New Approaches to Community Safety Utilizing Funding Incentives. The bill would: Create Federal Grant programs that incentivize decarceration and subsidize non-punitive, community-led approaches to public safety. ART BY JESSICA GAYLOR 3. Allocating New Money to Build Healthy, Sustainable & Equitable Communities for All People. The bill would: Establish a Grant to promote educational justice that incentivizes jurisdictions to make specified equity-focused policy changes and provides resources for programs and investments. Establish a Grant to promote environmental justice that incentivizes States to make specified equity-focused policy changes and provides resources for programs and investments in community. Establish a competitive grant to promote health and family justice that incentivizes jurisdictions to make specified equity-focused policy changes. Establish a competitive grant to promote economic justice that incentivizes States to make specified equity-focused policy changes and provides resources for programs and investments that include, but are not limited to: Food cooperatives and urban gardens; Paid parental and sick leave; Comprehensive, high-quality child and elder care; and The creation of comprehensive health centers that offer culturally competent services for all people, including services related to reproductive health. Establish a competitive Housing & Infrastructure Grant Program that incentivizes jurisdictions to make specified equity-focused policy changes. For example: Authorizing State funds to expand the affordable housing supply.
4. Holding Officials Accountable & Enhancing Self-Determination of Black Communities.The bill would: Require Congress to acknowledge and address the lasting harms that it has caused. Ensure democratic, fair, and secure voting processes that are free from racial discrimination and voter suppression in every State.
THE INSIGHT ALLIANCE PAGE 03 'Life of a Song' from the Financial Times UK FOLSOM PRISON BLUES BY JOHNNY CASH A NEW DEFINITION OF LOVE “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die”: it’s perhaps the most chilling line BY ECKHART TOLLE ever written in popular song. And the words are perhaps even more famous than "Some people have been trying for the song from which they come, “Folsom Prison Blues” by Johnny Cash. centuries to love their neighbor as Cash explained to Rolling Stone magazine what inspired the line: “I sat… trying to themselves. But they have been finding it think up the worst reason a person could have for killing another person, and difficult because loving your neighbor as that’s what came to mind. yourself really means, first of all, you need to be in touch with yourself, the self that ”The track came to be regarded as one of the great American country music songs you are beyond the form. And then and one that perhaps defined Cash’s career. It combines two archetypes of you can love your neighbor as yourself country music — the train song and the prison song — as well as two characteristics of Cash himself: sin, and the search for redemption. because you recognize your oneness with your neighbor... This quintessentially American song was actually written in the then West Germany, while Cash served in the US Air Force in the early 1950s. He wrote it So, I call love the recognizing of yourself in after watching the film 'Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison', a drama about the jail the other, and yourself, your essential self. near Sacramento, California. Then, when I meet people and interact He leaned heavily, however, on the melody of a song, “Crescent City Blues”, by US with people, I see them on two levels or composer Gordon Jenkins and even stole a few lines of its lyrics. Cash said he did feel them on two levels. On one level, they so because he had no inkling of becoming a professional songwriter at the time, are the form, which is the body and their and was later badly advised about his right to borrow so freely. He redeemed psychological makeup. On another level, matters by paying Jenkins a $75,000 settlement following a 1969 lawsuit — and by they are the consciousness that I creating a much superior song. also am, that pure essence..... He upped Jenkins’s slow, bluesy tempo to a chugging, train-like rhythm, somewhere between standard country and rock and roll — a combination that was And that makes it much easier to interact to become his hallmark. His dark lyrics were related by the Reno killer. with people and much more pleasant, Languishing in Folsom prison, he is tortured by regret and the sound of passing because sometimes the personality, the trains, their whistles, rattling wheels and passengers symbolizing his lost psychological makeup, is not that freedom. “I know I had it comin’/ I know I can’t be free/ But those people keep a- movin’/ And that’s what tortures me.” wonderful. And then one is able to let that go because you can sense that beyond Cash first recorded the song in 1955 for Sam Phillips’s Sun Records in Memphis. It that there is an essence to that human reached number four on the Billboard country chart and helped launch him to being." stardom. His second recording of it in 1968, however, was to be even more successful.
By then his career had nosedived as he became a prisoner to amphetamines and without a hit record for four years. But, having shed his addiction, he decided to record a live album at Folsom Prison. Cash was a lifelong champion of prisoners, and performed free concerts for them regularly throughout his career; in January 1968 he performed two shows at the prison, recordings of which were released as the classic album At Folsom Prison.
At the prison shows, he used for the first time what became his introductory catchphrase: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” Then he and his band launched into “Folsom Prison Blues.
THE INSIGHT ALLIANCE PAGE 04 Lockdown Diaries The Unlimited Power of Your Being (Inspired by the Willamette Week) BY BARB PATTERSON, INSIGHT ALLIANCE BOARD MEMBER
Where we come from inside ourselves matters more than any singular activity we will do. Where we come from inside ourselves shapes everything that comes afterwards. Said another way, there is no real doing in the world that is not first impacted by where it is coming from.
When I first started to learn about the power and potential of our minds, I woke up to Roxanne the role that our state-of-mind, our clarity of mind, was having in any given moment. I Teacher and Board Member could see that my quality of mind was shaping what I saw and how I responded. It has 1. Occupation: Yoga Instructor/Property a direct relationship to our output and the quality of our exchanges with others. Manager/ Insight Alliance Teacher
2.Age: 58 Once I saw it, I started to respect a freer, more open, present mind. I no longer respected my urgent, sped up, reactive mind. Of course, it still happens but I know, left 3. How many people do you live with? to its own devices our minds settle and when they do, it changes what we see and the Myself, my dog and my cat possibilities that are available to us. 4. What have you been eating? Vegetables, same as always Here was the surprise…there was even more to discover. Beyond the surface of my 5. What have you been watching, thinking, my effort and my strategies resides an incredible, innate, resourcefulness. listening to or playing during Beyond the familiar and known is a “Well of Being”; an infinite source of new thought, quarantine? Masterpiece theater on the fresh perspective, shifts of consciousness, pure potential, connection and love. This BBC. My daughter and I had a Well of Being, our deeper nature, funds and fuels all of life, including us. quarantine cribbage tournament going.
When we discover and have our own personal felt knowing of this deeper nature, it 6. Have you picked up a new hobby or has profound and practical implications for our lives and our work in the world. There resumed an old one? Been making is no real “doing” in the world that is not first impacted by our “being”. playlists on Spotify, The Police's Don't Stand So Close To Me features One afternoon while sitting at my desk looking out the window, I had this thought, prominently “What if you got as curious about this deeper nature as you are about how to have a 7. What's the weirdest thing you've done successful business?” I started to see how common and ordinary it was for us to have so far? Tried to make a bench out of new thought. Thought was moving through us, I wasn’t manufacturing it or controlling wood in the yard, realized there's not it. I started to get a feel for that still quiet place inside and the richness of it. I was enough wood and made a planter getting touched by life in more ways. Simple ways, like taking in nature, feeling more 8. What's your secret to staying sane? present and connected to the people I love and my clients. I started to understand that connection was constant, the only variable was my experience of it. Lots of yoga and meditation 9. What's the first thing you're doing I was having new insights about my past. I started to see how that inner knowing, our when this is over? Run with my dog on essence, was helping me along throughout my life. I was often in over my head and in the beach without a mask. the unknown, yet I found my way. I saw that some of the most instrumental moments 10. What has quarantine taught you in my life were not of my own doing. Life happens, life unfolds and evolves regardless about yourself? Even though I have good of my efforts. The deeper nature of life is living through us at all times. and bad days I KNOW my well-being is
always in tact.
THE INSIGHT ALLIANCE PAGE 05 CONTINUED FROM PG 3. FOR CITIZENSHIP BY JOHN O'DONOHUE I’ve come to appreciate the power and magic in this space within. A little goes a really long way. When we connect, even for a moment, it leaves an In these times when anger imprint. When we realize we have this incredible, innate, built in, Is turned into anxiety resourcefulness, it creates a new home base. We do not have to be perfect to And someone has stolen benefit. We do not have to be a guru to access this deeper nature. The horizons and mountains,
Our own knowing is enough. Our own knowing gives us the confidence and Our small emperors on parade certainty needed to navigate our lives. Our relationship to our deeper nature Never expect our indifference – our Being – is more important than what we do. It is THE THING that fuels To disturb their nakedness. what you do. They keep their heads down Freedom and the Choice to Live And their eyes gleam with reflection BY PAUL SPANN AT CRCI From aluminum economic ground,
Freedom means finding the path that will lead you to knowing who you are The media wraps everything and not who you’ve made yourself become. In a cellophane of sound, Freedom is finding what you lost and bringing it back no matter how difficult And the ghost surface of the virtual the challenge. Overlays the breathing earth. Freedom is letting go of being tough and cool, letting go of what made you miserable. The industry of distraction Freedom is telling of deep dark secrets and not avoiding the feelings that Makes us forget belong with those secrets. That we live in a universe.
A choice is the decision to remain a prisoner to the past, or to take the We have become converts freedom that exists. To the religion of stress A choice is getting the freedom that everyone has but few choose to take And its deity of progress; advantage of using.
A choice is knowing what you have to do, then finding the means to do it. That we may have courage A choice can cause fear. But is is also a choice to conquer that embedded To turn aside from it all fear. And come to kneel down before the poor,
To discover what we must do, To really live does not mean what I look like on the outside, but who I am on How to turn anxiety the inside. Back into anger, To really live does not mean to be tough and cool, showing the world only How to find our way home. what I want them to see. To really live means to uncover the masks, to not put on a show that doesn’t impress those you think you’re impressing. To really live mean to feel on both the inside and outside.
I have the ability to be free, to choose not to hide behind walls of toughness and being cool. I have the ability to choose how I want to live on the inside and to be who I am on the outside. Only I can make this choice, and I can choose to live with freedom or as a prisoner.
THE INSIGHT ALLIANCE PAGE 06 Some Good News! A QUOTE BY POSITIVE STORIES FROM ACROSS THE COUNTRY NELSON MANDELA
Court Orders Shutdown and Removal of Oil From the Dakota Access Pipeline "No one is born hating another person A federal judge has ordered the Dakota Access Pipeline to shut down and for the color of their skin or their remove all oil within 30 days, a huge win for Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, the religion. People must learn to hate, and if Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, and the other plaintiffs. “Today is a historic day they learn to hate, they can be taught to for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and the many people who have supported love, for love comes more naturally than us in the fight against the pipeline,” Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman Mike Faith its opposite."
Squeaky-clean Kindness When your nickname is “The Dogfather of Harlem,” you know you’re doing A SMALL NEEDFUL FACT something right. Brian Taylor owns the Harlem Doggie Day Spa in New York BY ROSS GAY City, and he’s living up to his (nick)name by offering free services to pet parents financially impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. Taylor says Is that Eric Garner worked for some time he’s lost about 80% of his business because of coronavirus restrictions, but for the Parks and Rec. Horticultural his regulars are extremely loyal -- and extremely kind. When Taylor posted Department, which means, perhaps, that about a pup relief fund online, plenty of customers pitched in. With their with his very large hands, perhaps, in all help, Taylor raised $2,000 and has helped about 12 pet owners so far. Here’s likelihood, he put gently into the earth a fun fact: Taylor started his career in finance, but decided to get certified some plants which, most likely, some of as a groomer in 2010 after noticing there weren't a lot of grooming facilities in Harlem. A decade later, he's groomed more than 6,000 dogs. them, in all likelihood, continue to grow, continue to do what such plants do, like Supreme Court Delivers Major Victory To LGBTQ Employees in a Historic Decision house and feed small and necessary The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects creatures, like being pleasant to touch and gay, lesbian, and transgender employees from discrimination based on sex. smell, like converting sunlight into food, "Today," Justice Neil Gorsuch said, "we must decide whether an employer can like making it easier for us to breathe. fire someone simply for being homosexual or transgender. The answer is clear." He found such discrimination is barred by the language in the 1964 law that bans discrimination in employment based on race, religion, national PHOTO BY ROY DECARAVA origin or sex.
Supreme Court blocks Trump’s bid to end DACA, a win for undocumented ‘dreamers’ Nineteen years is a long time to hold onto the uncertain hope that a dream will come true. Although it has seen many iterations, the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors or DREAM Act first appeared nearly two decades ago in August 2001 as a bipartisan effort to provide a pathway to legal status for those who as minors migrated to the United States without authorization. For the over 700,000 Dreamers, the potential beneficiaries of the DREAM Act, their cause for hope just became more justifiable.
Last Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court rendered its decision in Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of University of California, declaring the Trump administration’s order to end DACA, a program which has prevented removal of qualifying migrants, “arbitrary and capricious.”
THE INSIGHT ALLIANCE PAGE 07 A Contribution from OJRC A PIECE BY ALTHEA SELOOVER, DIRECTOR, INVESTIGATION & PRISONER SUPPORT How have you all been doing? At Oregon Justice Resource Center we’ve been busy trying to resume normal operations while also continuing to advocate for currently incarcerated folks in the COVID-19 crisis and work to hold Portland Police accountable for their use of chemical weapons against Portlanders. It’s a lot of work. Working in the criminal legal system means there is always work to do. There is always urgent and deeply necessary work to do. It means that it’s not hard for all of us to overwork, neglect our own needs, and ultimately cause harm to our wellbeing in the process. If my work is to facilitate justice, healing, and health for others, what am I saying about those values if I’m harming myself in the process? That’s been the question lately and I want to scale it out to you.
I have been thinking so much about my professional identity lately and how our culture asks us to segment ourselves in all these ways. More of the binary – this is professional, this is personal. Work hard now, take care of yourself later. I’ve been thinking about and really feeling all the parts of myself – the personal, professional, inner child, intimate, serious, grief-filled, inspired, poetic, messy, bossy, caring, daughter, sister, auntie, friend, nurturing, funny, intellectual, radical, advocate, rigid, scattered, and all the other parts of me. Since beginning my professional career I have struggled with systems that demand I segment myself. What is personal, what is professional. What is allowed here, what is appropriate there. My posture, my clothing, the tone of my voice, the things I talk about, my energy, my writing style, my youthfulness, even the tools I use like my purse, the color of my pen, or my notebook get assessed moment to moment putting me in two columns that weigh out to good or bad. Where do the systems of value we live within come from? Where do hierarchies come from? Why is some work more valuable than other work? Why do some professions wear suits and some don’t? Think beyond the answers at the front of your mind.
Have you ever done one of those identity maps? Where you think of all the parts of your identity, put each one in a bubble with your name in the middle? Have you ever tried taking colored pencils or pens, color-coding each piece of your identity, and then drawing all the places where the parts of your identity intersect, blend together, and overlap? And then draw rigid dark lines to show the identities that are wholly separate? Mine looks like a gradient rainbow repeating, repeating, repeating in waves and ripples up and out – because there is no part of my life that doesn’t touch all the other parts. There are no dark lines of division. All of the pieces of myself are in conversation with all the others. I have learned integration is what is necessary to stay in alignment with myself.
Have you ever sat and written out what your top five or ten core values are? If so, have you considered if you equally apply each of those values internally as you do externally? If an ethic of care is one of my core values, my answer would be that I am very good at reflecting that value in my actions for others and not so good at reflecting that value inward in the ways I treat myself. My self-care practices have gotten better and yet it’s still not an equal balance. Much of this imbalance comes in my work hours.
Specifically in the realm of work and professionalism, are there things you do at work you don’t do in your personal time or personal life? Are there ways you are talked to at work that you would handle differently off the clock? Are there ways you treat yourself at work that you would do differently in your personal time? When you have the opportunity to take a break, do you, or do you work through it? In your work place, what makes a boss or supervisor think you’re a “good” worker? In my work, I historically haven’t taken breaks, I sit in ways that make my body hurt, and work long hours to be seen as a “good” worker. Am I really being “good” and who defines “good?”
I have a lot of questions today. In this time of national unrest, in this time of crisis, in this time of extra discomfort and frustration, I’m finding it’s immensely helpful to turn inward to examine the contradictions I live – to question the systems I participate in and ask myself, if these systems were truly working for me, which of my needs would be met? How could I be more functional, more healthy, more satisfied, more connected? Reflect with me. Until next time, be well.
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