(note: definitions are quoted directly from the dictionary)

Social. 

Worker. 

Social. Of or relating to society or its organization. 

Social. Of or relating to rank and status in society. 

Worker. An employee. 

Worker. A person who works in a specified way. 

As a social worker, I am very familiar with theories of human development, among them the theories of ego development. I have known, or rather, I have learned, that humans in infancy are incapable of differentiating themselves from the people and events in their lives. For the first time in my life, I heard this described as an inability to compartmentalize. It is funny that the word ‘compartmentalize’ has been brought to my attention recently by a close friend. He may argue that we suffer by compartmentalizing our lives. Here is our work, and there is our family, and here you can play, and there you must be quiet, and here is me and there is a worm.  

Ego development. Human development. We come to this world, thinking beings, believing that we are somehow connected with every event and every person. But after a few days or months or years have passed, the idea of associating ourselves with this world, without distinction, becomes absurd.  Now I recognize, as a social worker should, that this disassociation is a protective factor. But then, I have never (in theory) been a proponent of disconnecting from what is emotionally difficult. Because we are alive. We are filled with life. We are foolish, us humans, but we are here, and we should fully experience that emotionally. At our best, we give word to the feelings of others, allow for a second of connectedness, wherein there is no disassociation from human to human or world to world or life to life. At our worst, the idea of associating ourselves from this world is something to grow out of. But we are food for worms. Where's the sense of ego in that? 

Social. Needing companionship. 

Social. Living together in organized communities, typically with different casts, as ants, bees, wasps, and termites do. 

Worker. A person who works hard. 

Worker. In social insects such as bees, wasps, ants, and termites, a neuter or undeveloped female that is a member of what is usually the most numerous caste and does the basic work of the colony. 

Life lines and extinction

A discomforting thought poked me in the head the other day; an unwelcome awareness that I have an ancestral line that dates back as far as can be imagined. I have had ancestors alive at any point in time. The simple testament of my existence declares that by blood has been here through the ages. People I can credit my existence to were breathing in the1960's, the 1930's. They crossed an ocean and settled in the US. Even fought a few wars here. And before that, I am sure they fought battles in Europe. They were on one side or the other of a revolution. Changed religions. Built things that have long since disappeared. And quite probably a few things that have not. They were carving out a life somewhere while Jesus walked the Earth. They were part of the movement away from hunting and gathering to agriculture. They were a part of evolution as we know it. They had to have been. Because I am. And to survive it all is both astounding and horrifying. 

I watched a match burn down. The fire slowly moving towards my fingers. It was beautiful and gave me pause. But just like human innovation, it soon consumed all that sustained it.  

I drifted off in a meeting today, undoubtedly with that vacant look on my face, the hallmark of boredom, or so I've thought. I came back to reality feeling a little sheepish, trying to decide whether my mouth was hanging open, and immediately began to criticize myself for not being able to engage the material. Each time I drift off now I try and trace my distraction to its root. And each time, I find that I veered off shortly after hearing something interesting. Thought provoking, in fact.

I recently heard that our brain sleeps a lot during the day. I knew that while we slept our brain went through cycles, but I did not know that those cycles continue through the waking hours. I notice these slips in and out of consciousness when I am reading and go a few pages before realizing I have no idea what I've read, or pulling into the driveway and having no recollection of the journey, or sitting in a meeting and realizing I am thinking about rabbits instead of progress reports. While our bodies continue to function unconsciously, we lose conscious thought.

As we are able to look at the functioning brain in new and exciting ways, neuroscience is teaching us that sleep plays a function in processing information. We cannot remember what we have learned the day before without sufficient sleep the proceeding night. I read a study before that suggested that dreams are survival tactics - dogs run in dreams because they are learning how to survive the challenges of their day. Humans dream they are naked so they know how to get out of church when that happens. I don't know. The ideas connect in my mind - daydreams are opportunities throughout the day to process what we are learning.

So there I am, sitting in a four hour meeting, paying attention with the best of them, learning good things, when suddenly I have drifted off into some fantasy. I am ok with that. Children use play as a way of making sense of their world. It stimulates their brain and creates the necessary synopsis to grow and develop. I think play time is just as crucial for adults. We need play to make sense of our experiences. We drift into fantasies of saying something brilliant or chewing someone out or running away to Thailand, or bunnies, and something about the process and the white noise and turning off conscious thought and control helps us incorporate what we have been learning.

What I really want is to not take myself so seriously. Learning takes humility. It takes letting go. Maybe it takes a jaw ajar during a meeting. I want to have grace with myself. At my best, I am an untamable mystery.

Retreat

There is a beautiful gazebo across from our yard. Everyone who visits comments on the beauty of this gazebo. They ask who owns it and how often they use it. No one ever uses the gazebo. It was intended as a spiritual retreat. It is a retreat for the groundhogs I chase from my garden. Today, though, I saw a brilliant orange passing through the trees and into the gazebo. Our neighbor’s relatives are in from Laos for a wedding. One, a monk, found his way to the gazebo. It made me realize that quiet rest and contemplation are practices. They take practice.

What the duck?

Ducks gather by the crick running through my back yard like travelers gather by the pool at a resort. Only the ducks are not vacationing. They are being ducks. I wish I were a duck. 

I saw the remains of a duck by the side of the road, torn to pieces by something. I guess that is the price you pay for sitting by the water all day instead of building walls around yourself.

The other day I sat looking at the gathered ducks. There were three distinct groups. Since most of the female ducks are sitting on nests, the largest group consisted of lone males, glistening green at the top like bottles of champagne. One male sat off from the group with a female duck. I have heard that ducks mate for life, and this site filled me with romantic thoughts of my partner with his own fancifully feathered head. The third ‘grouping’ was a single duck – female. She sat alone between the others. Separate. I look at her and imagine the blanket of feathers and duck parts by the side of the road. I wonder if she lost her mate.

I wondered about the ducks. I like to think the single-mate notion has merit in nature outside of human invention. But does their social life mirror our own in any other way? Does the male duck sitting with his partner feel disappointed to be separated from the other males? Does the female partner feel guilt for the nature of partnership? Is she infertile? Does she feel guilty about that? Does the lone female feel lonely? Does she look at the partnered female with envy? Does she hate the other female? Does she hate herself without a mate to give her some reason not to? Do the males sitting in a group ever get tempted? Do they look longingly at the smooth brown feathers of both the partnered and widowed female duck while their own mates sit on nests, hatching their progeny? Or are they just ducks? 

Why can't we just say "easel"?

The words we unconsciously use reflect the society we have constructed. The words we chose can dismantle that society by making thought conscious again. 

Working Habits

Life is so prescribed, and increasingly so with age. There is an order to my day forged by centuries of civilization. To lose yourself to it is, simply, to lose yourself. A habitualized life maintains the status quo. The concept of seizing the day isn’t about being a go-getter at work; going above and beyond the call of civilized duty. It is about awakening to choice; to the opportunities in every moment to make your own way. This is very difficult to do in civilized society. It is impossible to do in a cubicle. 

An Integrative Life

For my birthday I received two bracelets – one with beads from Turkey, and one spun from grass. Looking down at my wrists was a strong visual of the ongoing tension I feel between exploring the world and setting deep roots to land and community. The tension is punctuated by my partner’s departure for Nepal in a week and our visit to a sheep farm last month. The idea of each path titillates me as I punch out a life in suburbia. But I strongly believe in living an integrative life. I know what it is to trek through Nepal, even though I have never been there. I know the stimulation of new sights, sounds, smells, tastes, oh how I love the tastes. I know the hospitality of others. I know the richness of new cultures. But life happens now. And right now, I can show that hospitality. I can incorporate rich traditions into my own day with incense and gongs and hugs and generosity. I can see and hear and smell and taste things anew with mindfulness. Likewise, I can know and care about what is in my backyard. I can experience the elements in an acre lot. I can work my body and grow my food and wash my clothes. I can invest in my community and get to know those around me and share life in little ways. I’m not saying I wont eventually follow a path to the Turkish beads or spun grass. I have heard that those who are faithful with little will be given much. But the much in my hands right now is this living moment wherein I can integrate where I have been and where I am now.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a

raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore

and then run?

Does it stink like rotten meant?

Or curst and sugar over

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sages

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

--Langston Hughes

Debunking Perfection

I exposed my stomach the other day, and not accidently.


For ten years I have taken every precaution to hide my stomach. I had an agreement that when it looked a certain way I would let it see the sun again. But for ten years my ribs or curves or pesky belly-button hair has broken the terms of this agreement.


The other day when I went swimming in my sports bra, it was not because my torso took on an eerily Halle Berry quality. In fact, I weigh more this year than ever before, and the bulk of that weight seems to have manifested in my gut (a very unfortunate predicament for a 27-year-old who has been married for 5-years and has the eager attention of countless eyes on her baby-growing parts).


And so it was time. It was time to remove a cloak and attempt to debunk this myth that anything less than perfect must be hidden, or that there is perfection because anything less is never shared and seen.


It was difficult to so nakedly expose my imperfection; to take that imagined blow to my image. In fact, I regret it. But I hope to do it again.

Renee the anarchist

What do you get when you mix a police officer and a teacher? A very legalistic daughter.
I have worked very hard my entire life to follow the letter of the law and avoid disappointing figures of authority. But my accumulating years have emboldened me, and I have become a bit of a rogue. One 'rule' I have begun to blatantly disregard is (prepare yourself...) "Do not walk on the grass". This was a hard one to break, not only because I am always afraid somone will yell at me (In my all-too-well socialized mind, there is always some authority figure hiding behind every corner in my life, waiting to jump out and humiliate me with flashing lights or a banging gavel or a raised voice), but also because my entire life I felt as though tramping across grass simply to get somewhere more quickly was (1) lazy, (2) a criminal act against the living grass, and (3) disrespectful to those who tended the lawns. For a long time, this rule fit nicely in my understanding of right and moral conduct. In college, I learned that large numbers of people walking on the ground would push down the soil and make it more difficult for things to grow. But what I have come to realize is - it's grass! And barely! This stuff with which the college campus near my house is adorned chokes out life. And the chemicals and gasoline that go into its maitenance is appaling. I agree that the land beneath it is valuable. If I had any hope that the college would utilize it more responsibly, I would respect their pathways and rules. I have no hope.

Another rule that has come to mean very little to me is, "No littering". It is strange that my increasing environmentalism leads me to disagree with a rule like this. I am a child of the 80's, and raised in a flood of Earth Day, Save the Rainforest, and Captain Planet. What I did not understand about society's embracing of environmentalism was that it is mostly aestetic. Why not litter? We create so much trash in the united states, but it is invisible to most of us! Why not clutter our lives with reality until we are moved to create true change?

bucks

There is life in blood

and water, but when i work

i'm clogged with java

Hot and Cold

Hot and cold are different. One is hot. One is cold. But hot and cold are the same. Hot is a temperature. So is cold. Hot and cold do not easily mix. Most often, where one is, the other is not. When they do meet, there are storms of white light and booming voices blowing off air, hot and cold. They bump up against one another, knocking foreheads until one secedes and storms out. Though sometimes, in the sleepiness of an early morning, those already awake will see them getting out of bed together. And from their union - life.

Person-In-Environment

"Person-in-Environment" is the calling card of social work. At it's theoretical base, this separates the profession from others in the human service field. It recognizes the agency of individuals and communities in creating change as a person or persons in their environment. But person-in-environment also speaks to social work's deep understanding that an environment or system can have a tremendous impact on an individual or community.

A joke: How many social workers does it take to change a lightbulb?
Punchline: The lightbulb doesn't need to change - the system needs to change.

Permaculture is also a person-in-environment model. Like social work, this systems theory recognizes the agency of individuals and communities to affect change through ecological means of meeting, sustaining and governing their own needs. Beyond that, it offers the ultimate social web, connecting across species to find the right 'fit' and relationship for mutual beneficence. There are unexplored models of interspecies cooperation and synergy that may guide social work theory and models if someone took the time to quietly observe and learn. Permaculture offers social work a new perspective on where our current systems falter, and the devastating impact on people (plus). For example, Temple Grandin has observed that, "some of the stereotyped behaviors exhibited by autistic children are also found in zoo animals who are raised in a barren environment".

So how many permaculturist social workers does it take to change a system? Lets find out.

Fixed Woman

b

Grandma's Eyes

Time

Working Girl

There is a creek behind my house. I visit there before driving to work. The early morning sun shows me a silhouette of myself, high heals and a briefcase, and I can see that the wind is attempting a rescue mission with my hair. I wonder if my soul is not as loosely bound, grabbing desperately after the wind but tethered to my skull. I pull them both back into a ponytail and drive off to work. I am the hamster who loves her wheel. But I know the tether to be fickle. It is not in the animal's nature to be bound forever. If you do not value life, how can you still fear death?

Chris Hedges

"...The Empire Is Over..."

Social Service Web of Life; Survival of Outsourcing

Since I have started working, I have been asking myself, "Why am I here?" Not only why am I, Renee Smith, here at this agency, but why is this agency here? It seems to me a brain drain on the county. Once the rockstars of clinical practice, people here now sit at desks making more money than their cubicles would suggest. I often wondered why the many agencies providing the same services competed for resources rather than uniting.

Assessing our different counties, we found five that were doing extraordinarily well in one particular practice area. Attempting to capture what it is they do that they could share with other agencies, we found that all five counties use providers for this particular practice. The county calls upon a small agency that was created to do what the county essentially does in this one area.

Normally I would bemoan the separation. This time, though, I pictured the web of service providers like our broader ecosystem. Then it made sense that certain agencies would specialize, just as species have endured by specializing. And perhaps, as in nature, there is a certain (social) security to this sort of diversity.

Weight Is Not Health

I enjoy living near a college campus for several reasons. It's a people-watcher's heaven! (There are no boundaries for what you might see or hear in an environment where 2,000 19-year-olds live together, let alone where sociology professors will assign social experiments as homework). I have a free gym membership. There's easy access to shows and speakers. I have constant visual confirmation that I finally look older than 15...which, surprisingly, doesn't feel like such a good thing any more. But more than anything, I enjoy being around the energy and excitement of learning, unlearning, thinking, and that unmatched openness to being challenged.

Little insights into these awakenings are everywhere. The other day, taking advantage of my free access to the gym, I saw an article suggesting some food or lifestyle that would make you fat. Luckily, someone whose former darkness of blind acceptance has begun to be punctured with beams of light, crossed out the word 'fat' and wrote above it, 'unhealthy'.

Thank you mysterious thinker! I hate how we have glued health and weight together. First of all, this is not any healthier than this! I have heard that our culture's disgust with the 'overweight' is the 'last acceptable prejudice'. And while we will also look with pity, if not disdain, at people who appear anorexic, we all still seem to aspire to be thin more than healthy. Which is why it is so important to further separate the two.

In middle school, when my diet was horrendous, I was very, very thin. Thinner than the athletes. Thinner than the vegetarians. I could not run laps. I could not do push ups. I was just thin. Not healthy. I have lost that lovely childhood metabolism, and after six months of being unemployed with round-the-clock access to my kitchen and couch, I have become very self-concious of my weight. I have not had the same concern for my health. Who cares if I have a heart attack? I just want people to stop assuming I'm pregnant!

I hate this about myself, and I write about it only to punctuate its existence. Especially now that I have found a job. I know that when I am working I forget to eat. I get so drawn into my assignments that I can go all day without so much as remembering to drink water. This is not healthier, but I look forward to it with the assumption that I will lose weight and fit slimly into my shirts again.

Health. Before I find it for my body, I need to find it in my mind.