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These are gardens of resistance. Life is strong enough to flourish and overtake the difficult conditions that civilization has created for it. Things of persistence, color, and creativity in a world bombarded with concrete and asphalt oppression. Surviving in a mechanized and routine environment where growth, nurturing and integration are secondary to the maintenance of institutions. A place where the lifecycle is thwarted.

I like to see the same kind of social-life forces in people. I often feel sad, angry and exhausted by all of the things that are oppressive about the world. Sometimes all I can see are the confines of my time, my relationships, my breath, and my flourishing. But, I find joy in moments outside of the mundane and outside of the commodity.

My truth is in moments of nurturing, vitality and creativity. It is an emotional place where I can live critically and love uncritically. This beauty is the spirit in a struggle for survival. And like the weeds growing in the sidewalks, revolution and resistance can be found in everyday life.

The goal of this project has been to find the gardens of resistance in my life and share them. It seems that I have more often had access to an education of oppression than to celebrations of resistance, so it may be skewed towards the former.

In working on this zine, I had to answer a few questions.

Why do it?

This is a way of sharing.

I have spent a lot of time in the last few years finding things that I think are essential. I have tried to reference, include, or capture the spirit of a lot of those things. Many of my friends or acquiantances don’t have political or theoretical connections, while they do have interest. This is exposure.

This is a way of reaching out.

For the last few years, I have been looking to myself and to the resources around me to be strong and true and to understand and build community. I have done a lot of listening, a lot of checking things out and assessing. Some of this writing dates back to 4 years ago.

While I have been developing my Anarchist politics, I have not established an Anarchist identity. Because of style and personal connections, I have felt tangential to the Anarchist scene. It is not just Anarchists that I want to reach out to, of course. Everyone experiences oppression, whether they can articulate it or not.

This is a benchmark.

What I really value is intimate relationships, and those are difficult to develop in groups and at events through which I have participated in the anarchist scene. This project has been a process of discovering intimacy with myself, with my pen, with my politics and emotions. I think there will be something new in here for everyone, even those of you who know me so well. I discovered new things, too.

This project marks something in me, but I can’t really articulate what. This little book is filled with stories, reflections, and compilations that will articulate it for me.

Is what I have to say interesting enough?

This was kind of easy to answer, especially since I decided not to force anyone to read it. I looked around and saw 1) that a lot of the things that I find interesting are really more boring than this, and generally the competition isn’t very tough. 2) My insecurities were probably more influential in this question than anything else.

Where should my boundaries be?

This comes up for two reasons: I expose myself and I expose others by printing this.

One of my biggest conflicts how to balance my relationships with people and my criticisms of the world and ways of operating within it. It often would be tactically smarter and certainly easier to not talk about how I am feeling, to not call people on shit that I see going down. Needless to say, this is hard. I have alienated a lot of people that I care about by being true to myself and talking about it. I have left relationships in ugly ways. I have also seen people that have the same feelings keep their mouths shut and leave “cleanly”.

In some cases, I make decisions to simply not engage in relationships that can’t be had honestly and openly. This has been alienating and disappointing for me and others. This has been particularly difficult in dealing with progressives who often fail to understand the dialectical nature of activism.

Some work that went into this writing was the product of emotional work for me personally. Here, I expose myself to the backlash of my words. Some of my criticisms of institutions are harsh. Important people in my life are a part of institutions, and they aren’t easily separable. I think I have opted to be on the “safe” side here, especially in exposing others. I avoided going to far into details of touchy issues that have already been emotionally trying for myself and people that I care about.

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Lived poetry has shown throughout history, even in partial revolts, even in crime…that it is the protector par excellence of everything irreducible in mankind, that is to say, of creative spontaneity. The will to unite the individual and the social, not on the basis of an illusory community but on that of subjectivity-that is what makes the new poetry into a weapon which everyone must learn to handle by himself. Poetic experience is henceforth at a premium. The organization of spontaneity will be the work of spontaneity itself.

-Vaneigem

Take this moment never away

Love the trees and the grasses

And the Wild flowers

Jasmine, sweetest

Jasmine

Patchy clouds that stars shine through

Deep blue blanket.

Insulated Bay Area

summer midnight.

Light breeze blowin’

Shuffle and kiss my hot tub soakin’

Arm is glisten-in’

This moment

I thought that Leor was my “first love”. What I know now is that he is the first person who didn’t want to trap me or expect me to be anything that I wasn’t already. The last I heard of him, a mutual friend told me, with a sad look in his eyes that he was no longer allowed to talk to girls who aren’t Jewish.

For Leor

It is in the deepest sparkle of your eyes where we have met.

Where you hold your strength.

Where you feel your pain.

Where I receive your passion.

It is here where only the present matters,

but where only the past and the future allow us

to appreciate our meeting.

Here, you are my kin. You are my grandfather,

my teacher, my brother and my son.

You are my lover.

Here is the unknown and it is the only place

where one is complete.

It is here that new lovers watch night become day;

the moon becomes the sun in an arch over the duned coastline.

It is here that a gift is given seemingly to insure that no matter what passes,

This meeting will be remembered as sacred.

It is here that being is living and it is here that I love you.

What better way of abolishing the poem could there be than realizing it?

-Vaneigem

This is about a guy who came through the East Bay to help start a local currency. He had worked with one in Colorado for a while and studied them elsewhere. I was really busy when I met him, doing activist stuff. I think he is the first person that really made it stick with me that the most important part of being an activist is to have room in your space, your time and your head to connect with people. I was also struck by what an impact he seemed to make on the local currency project as well as on the people that he was working with. I really started thinking about solidarity and about how open many groups are for someone to come in and “fix” them./

About Jhym

Breeze of Inspiration

Blowing through our town

Really no pretensions,

Just an open hearted kin

Who is real enough to really live

In the place that he is and with the people that he is around

What a world where an outside touch can affect community formation,

But for a brief moment, he wasn’t outside.

The ability is startling,

You are charmed,

Generous and Warm,

Loving and Strong.

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Where does the desire for understanding foreign lands come from? A desire to understand the other. To participate in, specifically to dominate, the exotic…By understanding the scale of foreign means taht understanding the local is immediately sacrificed. By dominating the other, it immediately follows that one is dominated. It ensues that the resulting mode necessarily be the exploitation and commodification of travel and understanding; that is cultural tourism.

This isn’t even going into the basic physical ramifications of movement. Travel isn’t sustainable for the masses. Environmentally, modes of travel like flying and driving are disastrous. Most travel experiences are alienating. The “Armchair Tourist” was a mainstream movie that addresses this. People don’t travel to connect with people, to live their lives, they travel to see things and buy crap. Most tourism is about visiting things that are set up specifically for tourists, not experiencing anything native or real to a local culture. At best, tourists participate in a nationalistic nostalgia.

Being Somewhere in the Geography of Nowhere

While the economic, communication and power systems that surround us and lead the masses in their daily lives continue to become more global and centralized, the most crucial form of resistance remains in being local. This resistance lies in the intimate networking of people within a geographically oriented community. This is the only scale on which we can realistically talk about empowerment, resisting consumption, and creating a living reality of liberation.

On the other hand, because of the global climate of our modern political economy, we must turn to non-local contacts for inspiration, information and solidarity. Some of the most stimulating events to other activists in the recent past have been actions which people have converged to fight global capitalist forces.

How community actualizes itself over space may be the most crucial element of community, in terms of its (dys)functionality and certainly sustainability. This is very different from how people currently and loosely use the term community. As far as I can tell, geographically oriented communities are termed as “neighborhoods” (it seems rare to find one that is really a community beyond block parties or neighborhood watching…gangs may be an exception to this), “intentional communities”, or “indigenous people”.

I often hear the term “community” to refer to a sense of community that may be appreciated by people sharing common projects, which it seems may or may not have common goals. For example, the “dance community” or vegetarian dining clubs…okay, probably even Amway meet this criteria. Although this is not necessarily a false sense of fulfillment, I would like to suggest that it may be an inappropriate or detrimental cooptation or evolution of how community is perceived.

The work of “community” implies an idealistic, long term, sustained and multifaceted support network. The needs that these loosely defined communities fulfill for the most part are social. Typically, the economic aspects of these communities are not separate agendas from an overarching capitalist system, in fact they are often complementary. I have rarely seen exchange of goods or services in any significant amounts that subverts dominant economic relationships or challenges status quo producer/consumer roles. These communities serve only to appease any vague dissatisfactions that participants may have.

Social needs in the US are mostly transitory. Kind of like plug and play. I work in the computer industry right now. Plug and play is a term that means you can take a disk drive, mouse or printer and just plug it into the computer to start using it. Social outlets such as bars, cafes, cycling clubs, are venues that can be found anywhere. Styles and interests are manufactured on a national and global scale. Some areas might have certain kinds of cultures in less density than others and some areas might be slower to get certain influences. I am not saying that thingsdon’t change at all, I am saying that mainstream American doesn’t change enough to draw lines. The only lines that are generally drawn are separatists’ lines, which are often attached to a localized community.

These interest oriented communities are an inevitable development of capitalist alienation. Specialization leads to special interest groups, which keeps individuals pacified by meeting their social needs. Rather than holistic education, myth, self-reliance and rites being the basis of interaction, alienated individuals boxed into sterile living quarters are compelled to find ways of relating to others with a limited knowledge base outside of alienated exchange.

So, this isn’t ideal, but why is it detrimental? Beyond the soical pacification and the perpetuation of specialization, I contend that this lie of community allows us to collectively forget the most fundamental factors of subsistence.

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.

-Source Unknown

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“When People are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called ‘The People’s Stick’.”

My history is strongly rooted in the working class.  I think I get my radical tendencies from my father who was a union guy.  I remember him proudly and romantically telling me about how he took nails to the picket line to flatten the tires of scabs who would cross it.  I come from what I call a “Pac Bell” family.  Both of my parents and my grandfather worked there.  It is where my parents met and my grandfather worked there for 40 years or something crazy like that.  My grandmother was a waitress, but didn’t work much past the age of 30.

My father made a pretty good living and also made good use of debt, eating out often and indulging in stereo systems and other things.  His spendy nature in combination with a decision to retire early from the phone company and changing costs of living in California meant that my family was downwardly mobile.  He never graduated from high school and wasn’t in very good physical condition so he was basically unemployed by the time I was 12.

When I was in 3rd grade, I got put in this special program for advanced kids and was tracked through that and into honors classes until I became the first in my family to go to college.  Although I had always known that I was of a different class than others in my schools before college, it had only really manifested in appreciation for families that kicked down to me, jealousy of those that didn’t, and a pretty serious resentment of my parents for not providing any money for college, unlike most of the people I was in school with.

Both my brother and I got our first jobs at  age 15.  This offered me the freedom from school and family that I needed.  I was able to buy a car, learn things that I really enjoyed more than school, like cooking and working with people.  From the age of 15-19, I continued working in food and other service jobs with some people my age and some people who had been working at these places for 20 years or so.  At these jobs, the roles were reversed from my classes.  I was intending to go to college and most of the people that I was working with never thought about it or had the opportunity.

After I went to college, I worked with a number of worker collectives.  In 1999, I was making more money than ever (still averaging less than $10/hr), and I was still feeling stressed about money and really trapped by the idea of working for that wage for 10 years before I would be able to pay off my student loans.  I also saw the dot-com economy taking off like crazy and knew that I had to get in on it soon if I wanted to take advantage of it.

While all of these things reinforced my working-class identity, they also obscured the specific role of class in my life.  My friend Aragorn encouraged me to think about why I was working.  Because I like doing my job? To make money?  To have good relationships with people as part of my work?  To change the world through my work?

My answer to those questions was all of the above.  I mostly did work that I enjoyed the actual act of.  Some of my jobs were cooking, baking, attendant work, and working at Pedal Express.  These things were a tolerable way to spend time.  Of course I was working to make money, because I needed it to survive.  The lack of money in my life was causing more stress than anything else, though.  I started looking at workplace relationships that I was depending on for my emotional support and critical feedback.  With some significant exceptions at all of my workplaces, I didn’t relate to people that I worked with outside of the context of work.  At Pedal Express in particular, I started feeling like the lefty-capitalist alternatives that I had been working in are more a part of the problem than the solution.  While in some ways it empowered my relationships with individuals, in others it obscured hierarchy and enforced middle class values.  While it made people feel good for living in a liberal city, it enabled them to be passive consumers with no real change in their habits.  While I had a hip and fun job, I was in financial crisis.  It simply wasn’t a living wage.
So I decided to confront the class issues that came up for me and find a white collar job, which I  had feared  for a few reasons.  I had no idea what job I could get hired for and definitely felt I wasn’t “polished” enough.  Although I am pretty polished for a politico, I found out that was kind of true.  What I didn’t expect was for potential employers to appreciate my DIY-style experience, recognizing that it could benefit their small business.  I feared betraying my history.  Coming from a blue collar, union family, I haven’t related to other kinds of workers.   I also had fear of getting sucked into the lifestyle that a good paying job could offer.  I solved this by setting student-loan financial goals and sticking to them (and not changing my friends or lifestyle much.  I probably also had concerns about being perceived as a sell-out by other radicals.  Getting over this just took confidence in my decision and my relationships.  I have gotten support and understanding from radicals, conservatives make jokes about selling out.

Parallel to this has been changing ideas about the importance of class and a change in interest from Marxism to Anarchism.  While I was working at Uprisings Bakery and really romanticizing it (which I still do), my friend Leor suggested that maybe factory work, even if it was worker-run factory work might not really be even a small step towards utopia.  At the time, it didn’t take much time to agree.  Now, on the other hand, while the thought of many factories is not very appealing, I think that I would really enjoy spending a lot of my time baking bread with women that I find inspiring.  I do think that there is a role for “work”, even what is currently considered “labor” in my life, but it is no longer the primary way in which I give and receive support, get satisfaction, or develop relationships. I guess that my work ethic has changed from something that is part of my identity to something that I have to do to in our society, a society that I don’t appreciate much.

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-from Ramona Forever by Beverly Cleary

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-Anne Marlow, How To Stop Time:  Heroin A-Z

This started as an essay that brought together Food, Relationships and Drugs as issues in my life.  After reading Anne Marlow’s How to Stop Time: Heroin A-Z, I decided that what brought these issues together was truly the issue of addiction, which in turn is question of nostalgia.

Comfort Food

Anyone who knows me, knows that food is my biggest trip.  I love to cook.  I love to eat.  And I especially love to feed others.  I love the recognition that I receive from filling people well.  I love baking  and filling up my kitchen with warmth and good smells and I love working with fresh foods and making a collage of greens, oranges, whites, reds, and purples on one well balanced plate.

Having a balance with food in my life is difficult and something that may always be a struggle for me.  While food is necessary and nourishing, it is also comforting, addicting and easily excessive.  As many people also do, I must question the relationship between food and comfort and between being nourished and seeking to fill a void of nuturance.

All You Need Is Love

My stimulation, my development, my coping used to come from my work now comes from  my relationships.  This is something that I decided to consciously focus on in a transition from a  Marxist to an anarchist perpective.  Building social relationships from the local has become my priority and since it has been my priority, I have found myself being constantly challenged in many ways.

My  primary exmple for intimate relationships was that of my parents who were married unhappily for 35 years and really had no other friends.  With the recently self-imposed near absence of TV, mass media, drugs, and a shift in focus from work, I have been able to begin unlearning roles and boundaries, ways of connecting, communicating and honesty and feelings.

I have learned to understand when and why I am angry, jealous or sad and instead of just having a reaction to it, I can now confront it and talk about it if necessary.   As this focus of personal consciousness has become my priority and reflecting upon my own history has been crucial to understanding my patterns and my families history.

I have particularly enjoyed the role of “polyamory” or non-monogamy in my life.  This has been a great way for me to be in really gratifying romantic and non-romantic relationships while not being too dependent on them.  It has also pushed my relationships into a level in which communication, understanding, and compassion are emphasized.

One of my struggles is to figure out what the role of a “partner” in my life will be.  There is definitely a perceived trade-off between making long-term decisions about my own life and wanting an unknown significant other to spend my days with for whom some of these plans/decisions might have to change.  For many reasons, I am not happy with an identity as a single person.

This issue brings up addiction concerns for me, as well.  It is easy for anyone to fall into a passive comfort-zone in a relationship because the way that relationships are had are so damned institutionalized.  I disdain the thought of losing my independence, but I disdain the thought of living without a companion, too. So far, it has been pretty hard to have both.
Dorothy Day found a similar struggle between company and solitude.  She had to choose between man and god.  She felt social pressures to sacrifice her class identity in order to worship in the Catholic church.  Others understood her desire for spiritual growth as a dissatisfaction of her physical pleasures.  It is the same fear of aloneness that I and many other women face and acts as the fundamentally sexist dynamic in our intimate relationships.  It can be hard to pursue my dreams independently; they have always revolved around having a partner there, on hold.  But, it is when I am alone and okay with my aloneness that I can achieve honest intimacy with those that I love.

The tragedy of relationships for me is always that I can’t know someone in a different kind of world…

“Perhaps I was a little ahead of my time.  Never has nostalgia held stronger sway; never has belief in the redemptive possiblilities of the future seemed so laughable.  And nostalgia is not only all pervasive in our culture, it’s accepted as harmless.  Until recent decades noone would have dreamed of reviving the clothes, furniture or objets d’art of earlier years: newer was always better.” (Marlowe)

It is easy to not have intimacy with others, partly because of our goal-oriented society.  Reading and other forms of mass communication are only good for theory behind our day to day objective relationships.  It is not uncommon for our subjective relationship to be misinterpreted as objective ones; particularly in the context of profit motivated and driven capitalist economies where in these realities that are perceived and experienced as mundane are things to be salvaged from a world of detached motivations.  Psychologically, we become blocked from seeing our recurrent alienation from people because of our individual layers of ethics of self-direction, goal-orientation and a necessary competitive mentality (except by those who are crazy) those who have counter-culturally withdrawn from economic relations or those who have generations ago and the cogs of capitalism under their fingers (in which case other types of dysfunctions psyches take over.

Due to the difficulties of receiving true nurturing from our world, people are more and more driven to seek comfort in the past, attaining the known, that is easier and more tangible.  There is no fear in seeking the already known.

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I fantasize about how my neighborhood might be different if we took out some of the roads, just 1/4 to 1/2 to grow food.  This  would  mean that people would walk 1 block to get to their house and there would be no street parking for those who drive to BART.

Fuck yeah, I’m a food snob.  Discovering fruit, vegetables, and exercise has been the most empowering thing that has ever happened to me.  The cleaner that my body feels, the healthier my mind feels and the happier I am.

My attitudes about my health are not about being vegan, a cyclist or any other category that I might be easily put in.  Although these are convenient ways to find comraderie, being one with my body and what I consume is the strongest basis that I have found for being a better person.  Growing and cooking food and having physical adventures with my friends have been a great basis for relationships.

Don’t get me wrong, I have had some great talks over coffee, but it is pretty hard to not think about the history, and harder still to not feel it’s ramifications.  Incorporating health into my daily life is resistance.

Look around at the health of people you see and at the physical landscape (especially in a city).  I think things would be a lot different if everyone were a food snob.

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