BLM: How to remedy "lack of care or compassion"? Free medical and dental clinics staffed by volunteers

New Portland, OR police chief Chuck Lovell points out on CBS News the "lack of care or compassion'' by the officers involved in killing George Floyd.

"When I watched the video of what happened to Mr. Floyd ... I remember the big takeaway I had ... it wasn't the tactics, it wasn't the number of officers who were there ... it was really the lack of care and compassion. The thought that this is an idea that could exist ... it almost felt like you're not important. To me, the fight is not with each other. The fight for all of us is against that idea that people, institutions, agencies ... can harbor that feeling and it has bad outcomes for people."

Lovell is right-on naming the root of racism and so many other -isms; it all comes down to harboring a lack of care or compassion in one's heart. 

How to change hearts? How to remedy harboring "lack of care or compassion" in people's hearts? 

Many spiritual teachings present tools for doing just that; it's sometimes called "The Golden Rule"--treat others as you would like to be treated. And sometimes we need a road map, a guidebook, an instruction manual for how to get from here to there.

History presents many examples to guide us, both negative and positive. U.S. history seems rife with negative examples of what happens when we harbor lack of care and compassion in our hearts (slavery, police brutality, wars of invasion and aggression, settler colonialism, strip mining, clear cutting old growth forests, massacring indigenous people, polluting industries, discrimination in all its forms, and on and on).

However, Portland history also presents examples of people uniting together with hearts brimming with care and compassion. 

One such example is the Free Medical and Dental Clinics founded and run by the Black Panthers and staffed by volunteer doctors and dentists from OHSU. 

(You can read all about this inspiring time in Lucas Burke and Judson Jeffries' book The Portland Black Panthers: Empowering Albina and Remaking a City.) 

Although Black Panther free medical and dental clinics were eventually destroyed by a series of decisions by Portland city officials and urban planners (whose hearts apparently harbored lack of care and compassion), now is the perfect time to start fresh. Here's one way.

OHSU, I'm talking to you. You can encourage dentists and doctors to once again volunteer to treat folks for free. In addition to studying the Black Panthers' Free Medical and Dental Clinics as a model of care and compassion, you can also emulate the volunteer-run Haight Ashbury Free Clinic. 

Founded in 1967, the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic's mission is "provide compassionate care regardless of anyone's ability to pay." It was the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic's volunteers who coined the now famous phrase, "Health care is a right, not a privilege." 

In conclusion, there are many ways (beyond a major restructuring of how police behave) we can nurture each other with hearts harboring care and compassion. One way is for volunteer doctors and dentists from OHSU to ASAP staff free medical and dental clinics in locations accessible for lots of Black folks and everyone. Follow the successful models of the former Portland Black Panthers', and current Haight-Ashbury, Free Clinics. Quickly establishing volunteer-staffed free medical and dental clinics is one of many ways to follow Portland's new police chief Chuck Lovell's implied advice to harbor care and compassion in our hearts. 

Eiko at TBA, Saturday night

Reading the text of trees, Eiko strokes the burnt ancient wood sculpted by time and flames, yet still rooted in the earth into which it will rot.

Eiko runs to greet her projected image flying red on a hillside. Fusing into a double-story Eiko bow strung with red fibers of woman’s lives. Landscape, live Eiko, video Eiko, one, while sound of rushing river rapids echoes in the vast warehouse hall. We are carried on, submerged in, the sound of water, of our mother’s womb water rushing blood pulsing eternally, as Eiko completes the woman bow of white and red and sky and hill that launches us ever onward in the tumbling life/death continuum eternal.

Eiko climbs the feet, legs, torso, chest of a man, her feet walk his height while her head and shoulders remain planted on solid flat floor. 

Eiko drapes over strong man’s back as he belly down slides on the floor, reminiscent of Eiko & Koma in a scene of LAND.

Eiko talks to us. Stands and speaks. The microphone invisible. Eventually I notice it—hung small at the end of a cord disguised by its proximity to a pillar. Eiko’s stories of loss, of recent death of choreographer friend, of death of mother, her words and full frontal presence confront my own layers of mourning. We are separate yet one, one with our deceased, one with our mourning.

Silence. Percussive rhythm of running feet in hightop sneakers on warehouse floor. Round and round the young man runs, circumambulating the interior walls, orbiting around us audience on the platform benches. Are we the sacred object whom he circumambulates? Eiko runs, her sandaled feet a different tone, a different rhythm, to the running young man. Eiko runs all out. Her 67 years of whatever pains our bodies endure over the years, her years ignored as she runs. Runs with the drive of our animal selves running. Fight or flight. This running, this fleeing is also a power. It is the soundtrack. It is the beating pulse, the heartbeat. Heartbeat of running feet. Heartbeat sound as human aerobic hearts beat ever faster, unheard by us, the seated audience, our hearts beating with the beating of shod feet on concrete. Feet shod not in cushy running shoes, but shod for other ways of moving, slower ways of moving. Yet the feet run and run and run beating rhythms with our very hearts enthralled.

Eiko runs to the exit door, flings it open and is out in the cold wet night, dark industrial asphalt. She screams, wails in mourning. The sound, the mourning, the emotion, was too big to be contained in the industrial warehouse. It needed the great outdoors as its stage.

Flowers. Huge bouquet of hydrangeas and other branches of flowers blooming in autumnal Portland gardens. Wrapped in huge newsprint wrapper, clasped in Eiko’s arms like a dead child she’s unwilling to let go of. Grasping the flowers as the paper falls. The bouquet rearranges in chaos, clutched to her heart in loss. Grief is not tidy. It is not floral wreaths on tripod stands around a polished box. Mourning grows wild from the earth, no matter how we tend it to our desires, mourning scatters even as it gathers.

All goes black.

Lights come back up. Eiko and her two collaborators stand evenly spaced, facing audience, who bursts into sustained applause. 

Eiko walks to center microphone and speaks energetic voice of appreciation, so different than her mournful voice of grief telling the stories of death and loss. Now she is thanking us all for coming to the festival; she hopes we have been enjoying ourselves. My mournful self is shocked with the sudden emotional shift, like being a passenger in a car driven by an expert racecar driver shifting emotional gears to skillfully maneuver a sharp steep curve and take a new direction.

Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!

About this poem

This poem is part of my Solstice solar year poem cycle, where I write a poem a day from June 22, 2019 to June 21, 2020. The poem a day may get posted on a different day than it was written, or several poems might get posted on the same day. And if I choose to submit a poem to a literary journal, I delete it from this blog before doing so. That's my project. I hope it touches your soul and makes you think.

And maybe inspires you to write more poems of your own.

Full Moon Falls from the Sky

Standing together in the living room looking out the window

Wind blowing hard from the west everything flipping around thrashing in the gale

Dust rises from the asphalt road as high as the telephone wires

Dust so thick I can not see through it

The road is unusable, too dangerous, no visibility

High in the sky the full moon shines in the northwest

Suddenly it falls in an arc to the west

Then it reappears back in its northwest high sky position

only to fall again

in rapid moonset

How can this be?

At this latitude the moon is never that far north.

Has the Earth tilted on her axis?

Speeded up her rotation?

Maybe that is causing the high winds.

No.

The winds are coming from the west.

If her rotation speeded up the winds would be coming from the east.

Maybe the moon has shifted her orbit and is speeding around the earth?

No.

Then she would show her phases as she set in the west of the night sky.

She stays full round bright.

How does the moon pop back into her position high in the northwest sky as the west wind whips the trees in fury and clouds the road with impenetrable dust?

I don’t know.

I have no explanation.

Just like the woman who the news says shot her brother dead on Friday and shot her aunt and grandmother, too. Doctors counted nine bullets in grandmother’s pelvis.

Like the full moon falling from the sky, I have no story to explain why.

About this poem

This poem is part of my Solstice solar year poem cycle, where I write a poem a day from June 22, 2019 to June 21, 2020. The poem a day may get posted on a different day than it was written, or several poems might get posted on the same day. And if I choose to submit a poem to a literary journal, I delete it from this blog before doing so. That's my project. I hope it touches your soul and makes you think.

And maybe inspires you to write more poems of your own.

A poem a day--Day 1--Grey Whale Die Off

At this solstice time I vow to write a poem a day for a solar year and post them here as I can.
(Although, when I decide to submit certain poems to literary journals, I'll delete them first from this blog.) Today I begin with the first poem of the cycle.

Grey Whale Die Off

Mamakocha ocean vomited 

160 Grey Whale corpses 

onto West Coast beaches so far this year.

The federal government is running out of space to bury the decomposing behemoths.

Scientist claim to have no idea why they are dying.

One Port Townsend couple with beach-front property “adopts” a whale corpse. It’s educational to watch it decompose. (Are we watching the species decompose?) The whale’s starved belly holds only bits of plastic and lots of eel grass, neither of which is part of their normal arctic diet. Desperation food that does not nourish whales.

A whale expert postpones alarm. First, he questions, “Is there any relationship to climate change? Does this link to any factors that might affect other species as well?”

Questions that reveal cluelessness about our interconnection on this blue-green planet rolling through the universe whose super-novad stars constitute our bodies. Our whale bodies. Our human bodies. The sea womb of life on this planet, the seawater red in our veins.

Our star dust bodies course seawater blood, yet we forgot the name of our Mother. 

Some stardust-seawater bodies called “human” manipulate decomposed dinosaurs into plastic, pollution, burning belches from factory stacks, car, truck, train, ship exhaust.

Forgetting “All Our Relations” some stardust-seawater bodies mass-produce deforested chemical pumped cows’ farts heating the globe.

Global heating climate crisis in this cauldron of planetary soup that is cooking us all.

Will someone please turn off the stove?

In the Salish Sea Native Americans sing and drum to killer whale Orca cousins and their still-born babies, slipping them a ceremonial salmon, hoping to stave off whale extinction.

Extinction Rebellion dances and sings a street closed in front of City Hall in Portland, Oregon.

We the people declare a climate emergency now now now.

 About this poem 

Inspired by personal experience and the following news reports:

https://nypost.com/2019/06/21/the-west-coast-is-running-out-of-space-to-put-dead-whales/

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/19/733955563/got-space-for-a-dead-whale

https://nypost.com/2019/04/05/federal-officials-support-native-tribes-push-for-only-whale-hunt-in-us/

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/25/orca-starving-washington-feed-salmon-lummi-native-american

https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2019/06/climate-change-protest-blocks-street-in-downtown-portland.html

https://nypost.com/2019/04/05/federal-officials-support-native-tribes-push-for-only-whale-hunt-in-us/

Lynette plays Marimba in concert 3/11 in Portland, Oregon

Put on your dancing shoes and come enjoy our upbeat music celebrating the joy of life! I'm playing marimba and singing in the group Marimba Masikati. We'll play a set near the end of an all-day free concert of six marimba bands. 11:30-3:30, Portland Foursquare Church, 2830 NE Flanders St, Portland, Oregon 97232. Hope to see you there!

https://www.facebook.com/events/1827469100862188/

Lynette plays panpipes and sings with Mary Rose's Beyond Little Boxes 3/26 in PDX

In honor of Women's History Month, we put together the program "Working Women Sing! Unsung Heroines of the Western World." Edu-tainment to touch your soul and make you think. Come hear us and sing along at 2 pm Sunday, March 26th at the Hollywood Library, 4040 NE Tillamook, Portland, Oregon.

Songs by and/or about women of the Americas in Spanish, English and Quechua (the language of the Inka). Songwriters featured are: Violetta Parra, Holly Near, Malvena Reynolds, Bev Grant, Libby Roderick, myself, and others.

In this concert I play panpipes and sing. Singer songwriter Mary Rose and I have been rehearsing together for months, learning each other's songs. It is a great honor to perform with Mary Rose, who I consider a National Living Treasure. Her trio "Beyond Little Boxes" will back us up as well as perform some of their repertoire of Malvena Reynolds protest songs. Jim Cook plays stand up bass and sings. Mark Loring (of the famous folk music Loring family), plays mandolin. Singer Jane Keefer, a longtime collaborator of Mary Rose's, will join us in song.

I hope you will pass the word to your friends in Portland, and best of all, I hope you can come and sing along.
Peace!