Tag: citizenship

In front of a faded wall mural of Donald Trump with an American flag background, a real hand holds up a real flag

America, the Irrational.

Published on by karin swann-rubensteinLeave a comment

In the past two weeks, I’ve been unreasonably addicted to the impeachment hearings. They’ve taken over my life, dispiriting me, swallowing up precious windows of time. Driving my children home from school, as the chatter slows down and we could settle together into silence, I turn up the volume on the radio. Instead of focussing on a writing project beckoning my attention, I’m one-hand-coffee-one-hand-remote in front of the TV.

It’s big news, of course. History-making. As a citizen, I’m called to witness that history, but let’s be honest, there’s a deeper story here. My unreasonable, addictive preoccupation with the impeachment hearings belies a hope that if I watch for long enough, some ‘truth’ or ‘fact’ might magically jump off the screen to save us all. Continue reading “America, the Irrational.” →

A star studded sky with a wispy nebula, small disks of distant galaxies, and a few bright stars.

PART TWO: Homecoming – Living At A Deeper Octave (5 of 5)

Published on by karin swann-rubensteinLeave a comment

It is impossible for you to go on as you were before, so you must go on as you never have. – Cheryl Strayed

My asking the question, “How did we get so terribly lost?” after all the inner unfolding I had done could lead someone to erroneously conclude that a story that started with despair ended in much the same place. It didn’t. Not by a long shot. Continue reading “PART TWO: Homecoming – Living At A Deeper Octave (5 of 5)” →

PART ONE: One Woman, Post-Trump Stress Disorder & the Whole Catastrophe – The Political Just Got a Whole Lot More Personal

Published on by karin swann-rubensteinLeave a comment

November 9, 2016 – USA. Over the last half-century, a number of stark memories have been seared into America’s psyche so shocking or painful or unexpected that they live largely unmetabolized as an image, a recollection, something we turn to each other to say: “Where were you when it happened?”  The images of the balcony of the Lorraine Motel the day after Martin Luther King was shot. The slowly driving motorcade and Jackie O. scrambling to climb back over the front seat towards her husband.  Two planes flying into twin towers and their slow, knee-buckling collapse into clouds of billowing dust. And, now, the day Donald Trump was elected.

My husband and I were at the theatre. The play was about Haitian immigrants in America, a powerful and touching story about racism and its overcoming. In spite of the standard request to turn off our cellphones, the news flickered on screens through the audience and ‘broke’ somewhere halfway through the second act.  Surely the actors must know, I kept thinking, watching them come back on the stage after leaving a scene.  I kept wondering how they came back to perform, devoted to their craft, following cues they returned while something inside them was surely collapsing.  “The show must go on” I kept thinking to myself, along with the spirit of the arts and our desire to digest, give human meaning, and resurrect love in the face of the history’s horrors. But the memory I have of the morning after is the one that stands out more fully, perhaps because it took at least the night for the reality to have the first opportunity to sink in.

I sat on the leather couch in our living room staring at the television with the sound on mute. My children had just left for school, boisterous and blissfully naïve about the bomb that just detonated in America’s constitutional soul. I stared at the talking heads on CNN, my awareness focused inward.

Something important is happening in our world that you will not read about in the newspapers. I consider it the most fascinating and hopeful development of our time, and it is one of the reasons I am so glad to be alive today. It has to do with our notion of the self. – Joanna Macey

Like others, I was still in shock but settled between the various pesto smudged stains and illicit pen marks on our family room couch, I could sense, next to my disbelief, something else hovering in my awareness. It seemed like inside the hollow silence created by this news some part of me was assessing the size of the test we were about to be put to, one that carried the potential to either break us as a nation or to birth something new – in me and in Americans. Whatever birth might be possible, however,  was going to depend on a pending breaking point, but I had no idea what that meant, what the timing would be, or what it would look like. Accompanying this intuition was also the haunting sense that everything in my life had somehow prepared me for this moment. Continue reading “PART ONE: One Woman, Post-Trump Stress Disorder & the Whole Catastrophe – The Political Just Got a Whole Lot More Personal” →

The Obama/ Buttigieg Difference: On the Appeal of a Post-Patriarchal Masculinity

Published on by karin swann-rubensteinLeave a comment

Amidst the rapidly growing pool of candidates for the democratic ticket in 2020, the relatively un-known, Pete Buttigieg, is making an un-expectedly big splash. “Mayor Pete” distinguishes himself in many ways — he’s the youngest candidate, an outside the beltway democrat from a red-state and, of course… he’s gay. People are also impressed with his grounded rhetoric — a down-home, reasoned and whip-smart common sense. Likened by more than a few to Barack Obama, Chris Cillizza writes: “Don’t look now, but (another) skinny kid with a funny name is turning heads in the presidential race.”

Like Obama, Buttigieg does have that remarkable ability to focus his sizable intelligence, (he’s a Rhodes scholar with a philosopher’s reflective interest in all-things-civic), on our complex political reality in readily, relatable ways. Also like Obama, he has that unflappable capacity to sound reassuring with every answer he offers, coming off cool no matter the curve ball.

But, I think there’s another reason why Buttigieg reassures us. Of all the candidates, he has something Obama had that’s essential to our future and yet that’s rare among men in leadership today: what I would describe as a post-patriarchal masculinity.

Continue reading “The Obama/ Buttigieg Difference: On the Appeal of a Post-Patriarchal Masculinity” →

About: the feminine (r)evolution

Published on by karin swann-rubensteinLeave a comment

Τhis site contains writing about all that has the potential to be born in dark and (r)evolutionary times.

The commentary, poetry, and essays on this blog spring from the heart of a woman, a mother of sons, and a gender warrior joining others today in the clarion call from our bodies saying “enough is enough!” My writing explores themes of power and vulnerability,  masculine and feminine, patriarchy, gender, and the territory – including the territory of the earth – where the personal has become newly political.

(r)evolutionary times

The seeds for all the great, progressive leaps in Western history have always been planted during trying times.  When outer conditions were experienced as increasingly in-humane, the human soul responded through the work of courageous, (r)evolutionary artists, philosophers, theorists and theologians whose creative engagements coalesced to articulate more meaningful human truths to live by.  The seedbed for democracy was planted this way, through stories written, revised, and debated over decades about a then ‘new’ “Man in the State of Nature.”

Today, we are again in such (r)evolutionary times.  Though life on the surface reflects a confident, status quo,  evidence of something new being born is all around, seeds planted where the darkness and weight of our culture’s hubris are felt and faced. Here, a new “notion of self”(Joanna Macy) is taking shape with an accompanying world view to support a more meaningful future for humanity and our earth.

For the last half-century, the pressures of Western, patriarchal capitalism and an increasingly alienating age of technology, have spawned a growing counter-movement that reflects a search for what it means to be meaningfully human.  We see it in many areas of our culture: in a desired return to the body, meditation, metaphysics and inner-reflection, in facing and healing racial and gender trauma, in unravelling the scripts of patriarchal gender conditioning in search of more authenticity, and in discovering a relationship to nature and economics that supports a

more sustainable, respectful engagement with a planet in peril.  All of these counter-movements reflect a striving for deeper meaning, connection, authenticity, realness, a movement to grow our humanity through an honest, inward turn.  This turn, which recognizes our all-t0o-human vulnerability, invites us to the territory of the feminine principle, territory historically diminished by the misconstruals and imbalances of a patriarchal worldview.

My writing, which could be said to align with the mounting definition of Fourth Wave Feminism, is informed by four, founding premises: Continue reading “About: the feminine (r)evolution” →

A “Moment” for our “Movement”: The Work of Creating a More Perfect Union

Published on by karin swann-rubensteinLeave a comment

Following the now-famed Women’s March on the day after President Trump’s inauguration, speculation mounted about whether we were seeing a real “movement” or simply a “moment” of reaction from an outraged electorate. Since that day, there’s been no dearth of citizens speaking up, in town-halls, airports and on city streets. People who never imagined themselves “protestors” have seized the reigns of citizenship suggesting that surely something is galvanizing America. But the question is an important one, does this yet qualify as a movement?

The Civil Rights movement has arguably been America’s most powerful testament to the power of citizenship in action, redefining the politics and consciousness of our deeply divided country in the 1960s. Unlike the civil rights movement that stood for values, (peace, de-segregation and an un-self-righteous faith in the intrinsic value of all Americans), the protests in recent weeks since Trumps election have largely been defined by an “anti-Trump” sentiment. As one among tens of thousands of women at the Women’s March in Oakland, I witnessed impassioned Americans filled with raw conviction, clearly seeking to take a stand. But the mobilization as a whole seemed to lack coherent leadership, values and a message. There was definitely something there, no doubt, but it felt young, like we were cutting our eye-teeth — not what I would call a movement. As the pundits have ventured, I would call upon us to see that we are in a moment – but an important one.  A defining moment. Continue reading “A “Moment” for our “Movement”: The Work of Creating a More Perfect Union” →