breath in, breath out

The following is excerpted from the chapter “Unlimited Friendliness” in a new book “Taking The Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears” by Pema Chodron.

A question that has intrigued me for years is this: how can we start exactly where we are, with all our entanglements, and still develop unconditional acceptance of ourselves instead of guilt and depression?

One of the most helpful methods I’ve found is the practice of compassionate abiding. This is a way of bringing warmth to unwanted feelings. It is a direct method of embracing our experience rather than rejecting it. So the next time you realize that you’re hooked, you could experiment with this approach.

Contacting the experience of being hooked you breath in, allowing the feeling completely and opening to it. The in-breath can be deep and relaxed – anything that helps you to let the feeling be there, anything that helps you not to push it away. Then still abiding with the urge and edginess of feelings such as craving or aggression, as you breath out you relax and give the feeling space. The out-breathe is not a way of sending the discomfort away but of ventilating it, or loosening the tension around it, of becoming aware of the space in which the discomfort is occurring.

The practice helps us to develop maitri because we willingly touch the parts of ourselves that we are not proud of [maitri is defined previously as "unconditional friendliness towards oneself"]. We touch feelings we think we shouldn’t be having – feelings of failure, of shame, of murderous rage, all those politically incorrect feelings like racial prejudice, disdain we feel for people we consider ugly or inferior, sexual addictions and phobias. We contact whatever we are experiencing and go beyond liking or disliking by breathing in and opening. Then we breathe out and relax. We continue for a few moments, or as long as we wish, synchronizing it with the breath. This process has a leaning-in quality. Breathing in and leaning in are very much the same. We touch the experience, feeling it in the body if that helps, and we breathe it in.

In the process of doing this, we are transmuting hard, reactive, rejecting energy into basic warmth and openness. It sounds dramatic, but really it is very simple and direct. All we are doing is breathing in and experiencing what’s happening, then breathing out as we continue to experience what’s happening. It’s a way of working with our negativity that appreciates that the negative energy per se is not the problem. Confusion only begins when we can’t abide with the intensity of the energy and therefore spin off. Staying present with our own energy allows it to keep flowing and move on. Abiding with our own energy is the ultimate non-aggression, the ultimate maitri.

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speaking of jefferson/hemings

I can almost hear Sandy now: “Come on, Dad!”

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gum springs

Gum Springs: A Slave’s Legacy

By Michael K. Bohn

This is an excerpt from a four-part series on the history and future of Gum Springs, a historically African-American community in the Mount Vernon area.

The founder of Gum Springs, a mixed race man named West Ford, began his life as a slave. His path to freedom started when his owner, George Washington’s younger brother, John Augustine, died in 1787.

West Ford, shown here in an 1858 drawing, founded the African-American community of Gum Springs in 1833. Fairfax County Public Library, Virginia Room.

John’s will left a third of his slaves to his wife Hannah, including a couple named Billy and Jenny, their daughter Venus, and her son West. Upon Hannah’s death in 1801, her will stipulated that young West be freed when he reached the age of 21. She also asked her heirs to inoculate West for small pox and bind him to a “good tradesman.”

Hannah’s son Bushrod assumed ownership of West, then 16 or 17. Also, Bushrod inherited Mount Vernon when Martha Washington died in 1802, and he moved there and took West with him. Following Hannah’s will, Bushrod freed West in about 1805. According to oral family history, West adopted the surname Ford upon gaining his freedom.

Ford remained at Mount Vernon, working as a wheelwright and carpenter. He could read and write, and ultimately became foreman of the house servants and a guardian of Washington’s tomb. In 1812, he married Priscilla Bell, a free black woman from Alexandria. Because of her status, their four children — William, Daniel, Jane and Julia — were also free.
Virginia required freed slaves to register, and the 1831 entry for West Ford described him as “a yellow man about forty-seven years of age, five feet eight and a half inches high, pleasant countenance, a wrinkle resembling a scar on the left cheek ….” Ford was a mulatto, a term of the time that was used to describe a person of one African and one European parent.

Bushrod Washington died in 1829. An associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court for 30 years, Washington left West Ford 119 acres of land on the south side of Little Hunting Creek.

Ford sold his inherited land and used the proceeds in 1833 to purchase Samuel Collard’s Gum Spring Farm, a 214-acre tract on the north side of Little Hunting Creek. Collard sold the property to Ford for $500 and five annual installments of $84.80.

In 1857, Ford deeded his Gum Springs land to his four children, dividing the tract into equal parts of 52 3⁄4 acres. The property lines of those parcels coincide exactly with many of today’s lot lines, as well as the main north-south roads in Gum Springs — Holland, Andrus, and Fordson.

The present limits of Gum Springs correspond with the 214-acre parcel bought by West Ford in 1833.

By 1860, Ford and his daughter Jane’s husband, Porter Smith, were growing cash crops of corn, oats, and potatoes. The total tract was assessed at $1,800 in 1860, making West Ford the second-most wealthy freedman in Fairfax County.

Ford was near death in the summer of 1863 when staff members at Mount Vernon brought the weakened man back to the estate for his final days. He died on July 30 and The Alexandria Gazette marked his passing: “He was, we hear, in the 79th year of his age. He was well known to most of our older citizens.”

WEST FORD’S FATHER

“George Washington is my fifth great-grandfather,” Linda Allen Bryant declared on the CBS News TV show, “Sunday Morning” in February 2004. Her assertion, which she first made in 1996, created a stir on two fronts — historians regard George as childless, and Ms. Bryant is African-American.

Bryant, a descendent of Gum Springs founder West Ford, maintains that General Washington was Ford’s father. A health writer and pharmaceutical representative in Aurora, Colo., Bryant seemed to take advantage of the publicity surrounding the Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings revelations in 1998 to draw attention to her claim.

The issue of southern plantation masters having their way with female slaves has simmered for years, largely among historians. But the controversy boiled over into the larger public consciousness following disclosures of Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings. Mulatto slaves were a common sight on Virginia’s plantations in the 1700s. They were the product of what some men then considered sport, and the slaves viewed as a loathsome manifestation of their plight.

THE FORD FAMILY ARGUMENT

Linda Bryant has written that John Washington sent Venus to comfort his brother George as a “sleep partner” during a visit by George to his brother’s home. The two surviving portraits of Ford show a resemblance to Washington men, and Ford’s freedom and inheritance reflected special status. Bryant expands her version of the family’s allegations in her novel, “I Cannot Tell a Lie.” She called it a “narrative history,” but the dialogue she injects into the subject is all hers.

Knowing that DNA testing resolved the Hemings’s family claims, the Ford descendents have pressed Mount Vernon for hair samples from the General. The Ladies Association has refused the request.

THE LADIES ASSOCIATION’S POSITION

The Mount Vernon Ladies Association has adamantly denied that General Washington fathered West Ford. “The Ford family contention is based on a family tradition,” said Dennis Pogue, Mount Vernon’s associate director of preservation in 2000. “We respect that, but if this is true, there should be other evidence to support it.” Pogue’s polite approach took a sharper edge in 2004, when he said, “there’s not a shred of evidence” to support the Ford family allegation. In late 2009, Pogue again reiterated Mount Vernon’s position.

Linda Allen Bryant continues to press her case in the court of public opinion, but her views are creating less and less interest.

SOURCE

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long awaited unfinished second novel

I remember reading Invisible Man at the University of Michigan and being uncomfortable wanting to discuss the biracial aspect in my African American studies class.  I did it anyway and of course came up against some opposition.  But I held my ground.  That was probably my first clue that this topic and the ensuing debate would become a passion of mine.

‘Important day for American literature’

CU prof helps publish Ralph Ellison’s unfinished novel

The Associated Press

BOULDER — Adam Bradley was a freshman in college and taking an African-American literature course when he first read “Invisible Man,” a novel that vivified America’s racial divide.

The book changed his life.

Ralph Ellison’s classic novel helped Bradley explore the complexity of his own biracial identity.

Adam Bradley is an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

It also shaped the direction of his career, as Bradley became a writer and scholar — spending 15 years conducting the literary detective workneeded to bring Ellison’s second novel to fruition.

Ellison’s incomplete, posthumous piece “Three Days Before the Shooting … : The Unfinished Second Novel” goes on sale Tuesday (2/2/20).

Bradley, a University of Colorado associate professor, is one of two editors who made the book’s release possible.

In the book, a racist, “white” U.S. senator is assassinated by a black man who, it turns out, is the senator’s son. The senator’s surrogate father, who is black, tries in vain to save the senator.

“I’m feeling this tremendous degree of excitement at the prospect of sharing this book with Ellison’s readers,” Bradley said.

Bradley said he’s received e-mails from people who read “Invisible Man” in the 1950s and have since been waiting for a second book from Ellison.

“It’s an important day for American literature,” Bradley said.

He said that because the novel is incomplete, it prompts readers to become co-creators of the fiction.

“It’s a natural response — when presented with an incomplete story — to complete the story yourselves,” Bradley said. “

At the same time, it presents another opportunity to come to terms with indeterminacy.”

Later this year, Bradley will teach a CU graduate seminar on Ellison, and Yale University Press will publish “Ralph Ellison in Progress,” his critical exploration of Ellison’s fiction.

Ellison died in 1994, leaving behind 27 boxes of manuscript for his second novel that included handwritten notes, typewritten pages and 460-some computer files.

Just two months before his death, Ellison told The New Yorker Magazine that he was working on the second novel and that “there will be something very soon.”

As an undergraduate at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., Bradley became intrigued with Ellison, whose father died when he was a child.

A character in “Invisible Man” tells the protagonist: “Be your own father, young man.”

The rich theme of father-son relationships struck Bradley, who was raised by his white mother and met his black father for the first time in his 20s.

“Ellison was a clarifying voice for me during that part of my life,” Bradley said.

His professor at Lewis & Clark — John Callahan — happened to be a friend of Ellison’s and executor of Ellison’s estate.

Callahan, impressed with Bradley, asked him to co-edit the second novel.

At age 19, Bradley began cataloging Ellison’s writings. He earned his Ph.D. in English and American literature and language from Harvard University before fully devoting himself to the project.

In 1999, Callahan released a small portion of Ellison’s second novel in a work titled “Juneteenth.”

Today’s release of “Three Days Before the Shooting …” will give readers their first view of the most complete and cohesive version of Ellison’s magnum opus.

SOURCE

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dumas disappointment

FRANCE: Race row in France after white actor used to play mixed race French national hero

SOURCE

FURIOUS BLACK campaigners in France have protested after filmmakers used a white actor to play legendary mixed race French writer and national hero, Alexandre Dumas.

In a film called L’Autre Dumas, Gerard Depardieu, who is blond and blue-eyed, was given darker skin and curly hair to play Dumas.

Dumas, the grandson of a Haitian slave and the son of a Napoleonic general, was mocked for his African features even as he created well-loved books such as the Count of Monte Cristo and the Three Musketeers. They are also high grossing hit films.

Patrick Lozès, the president of the Council of Black Associations of France (CRAN) told the Times: “In 150 years time could the role of Barack Obama be played in a film by a white actor with a fuzzy wig? Can Martin Luther King be played by a white?”The filmmakers also reportedly credited a fictional white assistant with creating some of Dumas’ well-loved books, The Times newspaper reported.

The campaigners said they are furious because the film not only uses a white actor, but seems to attempt to discredit Dumas’ genius, further bury his black origins and keep black actors off the screen.

“Possibly for commercial reasons they are whitewashing Dumas in order to blacken him further,” the Council said on its website.

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