Repairing the Breach
Virgo 3 // wealth, work, and the world we want to build
What is the energy like in your house? Mine is a mixed bag, but this note was found last week on a mirror and it has been promoted to the refrigerator door.
I was going to write a post about some cookbooks I’m obsessed with right now (reading them more than the actual cooking part), but then I went to a public lecture by the indomitable Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II and so now I’m taking this post a different direction. And this is the world we live in, isn’t it? A world where poverty and neofascism live alongside grocery shopping, meal plans and filling bird feeders.
Last night I had the privilege of sitting under the wise teaching of Rev. Dr. William Barber. I haven’t been to church in months and I immediately began to cry as his words and spirit filled the room. He read from the Psalms and talked about the politics of rejection and carrying the mantle of Dr. King. He talked about history and about “the stone that the builders rejected” becoming the cornerstone. And when he talked about Dr. King, he didn’t just mean the sentimental dream of little boys and girls holding hands. But the Dream of justice and care for the poor.
The Dream of a world where everyone can work and make a living wage, where housing is affordable, where care work is valued, and children have food.
To hear this talk in the last week of virgo with our card of 10 Pentacles gives me chills. This is a card about legacy, abundance, wealth! The pentacles (coins) are arranged in a Tree of Life to illustrate the fulfillment of the journey. In the traditional card an elder man sits at the forefront of the card with an abundant, familial scene behind him - children and pets and his family home are the backdrop. There is a sense of completion and satisfaction with a job well done. This card, in the context of Dr. Barber’s sermon, asks me two questions.
The first: what house have we built in America? On what foundation? Dr. King was passionately advocating for a living wage 60 years ago1! Because our country laid a foundation built on racism, exclusion, and greedy capitalism our legacy is broken. We, the wealthiest country, sit back in our proverbial arm chair to look out over our life’s work and what do we see? Millions going hungry every day, or rotting in our profitable prison complex, or working long hours to be paid pennies, or sending our kids off to school wondering if someone will shoot them in their classroom. The Tree is rotten.
However, the second question this card asks is: what legacy do we want to build? How can our choices now2 build a better world for our children? How can we be good ancestors? I’m reading
book Essential Labor and it begins with a quote from poet June Jordan, “Enormous reversals and revisions of our thinking patterns will have to be achieved somehow, and fast. And to accomplish such lifesaving alterations of society, we will have to deal with power: we will have to make love powerful.” I love how the 10 coins (first picture above) seems to imply a reversal. We can see one family above and one below. We are interconnected, deeply rooted together, with a shared future. My family’s wellbeing is dependent on the wellbeing of yours.We need to raise the minimum wage from the embarrassingly low amount of $7.25 (since 2009!) to at least $15. How can anyone survive, let alone raise a family, on that amount? There are 37 million people in America living in poverty and child poverty nearly doubled after the end of the child tax credit. And even for those of us with some wealth, there is still a racial gap. As Dr. Barber said, in the wealthiest country in the world we could lift millions out of poverty, but we choose not to and it is immoral.
We need to insist, as Garber says, that caregiving and parenting are the work that makes all work possible. The racist/misogynistic legacy of so called “unskilled” labor runs deep in our country and perpetuates the low-wage or unpaid care work that allows everything else to flourish! One of my children requires an aide at school. An aide, who’s skills include (but are not limited to) enjoying children3, employing safety and care skills, supporting their academic education, understanding the unique needs of neurodiverse and disabled kids, makes just $13/hour. And in some districts it’s less. And this is more than the people in our country who clean, nanny, collect garbage, and mother. And it’s why we should support striking workers.
And because balancing the scales always leads to inevitable loss for the people at the top, we need to see fascism for what it is and resist it at every opportunity. “Rectifying unjust inequalities will always bring pain to those who benefitted from such injustices. This pain will inevitability be experienced by some as oppression… This sense of loss, which is genuine, is manipulated in fascist politics into a grieved victimhood and is exploited to justify past, continuing, or new forms of oppression4.” It is insidious and rampant right now.
I’ll wrap up with a few poems and photos of the “wealth” being given so generously to me by the earth in these late-summer days. Because how do you dream of a future where the familial human legacy is better and more abundant than it is right now? “…By holding history in one hand and clenching hope in the other5.”
Affirmation
…I believe in living.
I believe in birth.
I believe in the sweat of love
and in the fire of truth.
And I believe that a lost ship,
steered by tired, seasick sailors,
can still be guided home
to port.
- Assata Shakur
To Be of Use
The work of the world is as common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident…
The pitcher cries for water to carry
And a person for work that is real.6
- Marge Piercy (quoted in Essential Labor)
god or whatever
I have friends who
talk about god
being there for them
lifting them up
keeping them going
and *something* is
doing that
for me too
I just call it
by other names
like hope and love
and sometimes
the universe
and some really
beautiful friends
-
I think it is WILDLY underestimated how much time, energy, & intention it takes to enjoy working with children. And if you don’t enjoy them, you will not form secure attachments with them which we are learning is vital to healthy human development (and the lack of which is probably another contributing factor to how fucked up our world is right now).
How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, by Jason Stanley
A poem for the end of virgo season: To Be of Use
Such a great post. I love how you highlight these connections.
I love this post. How exciting you got to hear Rev. William Barber! He was the commencement speaker at my seminary graduation in 2016 and he has quite the presence and radical (for America) message. We need to hear it. I was going to ask you if you'd read or heard about Matthew Desmond's new book but then you had a photo of it! I haven't read it but read an interview in Sojourners with him, and it was SO powerful and I want to read the book. Allowing poverty in this country, with the wealth we have available, is a choice. Love how the tarot cards were integrating so well with the message too, as they often do!!