Tag: self-compassion

Acevedo Butcher

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

When I was 12, I had a well-intentioned teacher who called roll by making a rhyme out of my last name, Acevedo. He mispronounced all but its last long o and rhymed that with “hot potato.”

How do you say Acevedo? My LinkedIn profile has a recording, here. It’s “AH-suh-VAY-dough.” I have no doubt my homeroom teacher was kind-hearted because he was also my basketball coach, and I’ve had basketball coaches who scared me, while he was someone who made me want to play better, and to hustle.

Still.

What I learned from that experience is that names are very important. It’s a lesson that has stayed with me to this day. As a teacher at UC Berkeley in the College Writing Programs, I make an effort to learn what my students’ names are and how they pronounce them, and I try not to be awkward about it.

Along the way, I’ve learned a lot about names in general, and I’ve often had students say, “Thank you so much for learning my name. I’ve never had that before.” While I’m sad to hear that it’s not universal, I know that my colleagues in CWP do the same, as do my friends who teach elsewhere, and also very many other teachers, prioritizing learning their students’ names and how to pronounce them well.

I’m grateful for the chance as a teacher to honor students’ actual names.

I also want to consider how grateful I am personally for those who honor that I myself have two last names. When I first started back into the work force as a college professor after having been a stay-at-home mom for years, I used my maiden name Acevedo and my married name Butcher. I mainly did it for practical reasons. I wanted those who knew me at UGA in graduate school and others who knew me as Carmen Acevedo, to know that I am now Carmen Acevedo Butcher. However, it was an uphill climb. When I was invited to give talks and such, I’d submit all the information with my three names, but no one ever used Acevedo much. So I kind of gave up. I became Carmen Butcher.

When I became a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at Sogang University in Seoul, my husband Sean suggested we make a website so students could have my notes more easily, so we did. But all three names seemed then too long for my website, if I wanted it to be easily memorable for my students, especially from the perspective of teaching English in a country where Hangul was their first script and Korean their first language.

So my website has always been www.carmenbutcher.com. I think today if I had to do it over I’d keep all three. My Acevedo name is that important to me. I know I look light-skinned now, and I’m married to a White man from England. So I very often get slotted into that space, and I can see why.

But, (and this is another reason I try not to assume about my students), as a good, long-time friend said to me recently, “You were so much darker skinned as a kid.” And my mother would always say to me as I was growing up: “You have such beautiful olive skin and complexion.” That is how my identity formed, as that darker-skinned kid who tanned easily playing outside and felt on the margins and/or not-fitting-in growing up in mostly White communities, even as I was proud of my darker skin and loved our summer trips to Miami, to visit my great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins there. I was so proud to eat then and at times at home the Cuban foods of my father’s heritage, and mine. It’s one reason I use more tan-skinned emojis.

Names are complex. Names are sacred. As I began publishing, and admittedly, as society started changing in its attitudes towards names and naming, it became important to me to have my whole self on the cover, even as every book is created by so very many people, and not just one author. For my work and career as a writer, I wanted my whole self, or Carmen Acevedo Butcher there with me. Not to would have felt as if something was missing.

So I looked up to see the history on two last names. I learned that there is a most repulsive phrase for it: “double-barrelled name.” Because of its first use and association with firearms, since 1709, when Richard Steele wrote in the literary and society journal Tatler: “His double-barrelled Pistols.” I prefer “double surname” or simply “two last names.” Many join theirs with a hyphen. I don’t. It’s Acevedo Butcher.

I’m also reminded that today many of my students with Latina, Latine, and Latino backgrounds are honoring their heritage more openly as they include their double surnames in their school records, with the first being their father’s surname and the second their mother’s.

Curious one day to see my author page online, since I’m grateful to be there and wanted to check out my new digs, I couldn’t find myself under the A‘s. My heart sank a little. There I was under Butcher, so I asked the kind people who help me there to please put my author page under Acevedo Butcher. This is also why I’m so thankful when someone I don’t even know emails me to ask, “Do I cite you as Butcher, Carmen, or as Acevedo Butcher, Carmen?” I write back, “Thank you! It’s Acevedo Butcher, Carmen.” And recently, a brilliant, kind, and wise new friend messaged me on social media, “Dr. Butcher,” and I was so thrilled to hear from this friend and to be invited into a conversation with this friend that I didn’t notice until later that there was also right after a second message: “I apologize – Dr. Acevedo Butcher, I should have said.”

I think this kindness reaches so deeply for me because I’ve spent my whole life trying to build selfhood. I started life in childhood trauma that undoes the sacred selfhood, and twig-by-twig, I have been slowly building my own nest of personhood, of dignity, of self-compassion, and of compassion for others.

Meanwhile I was writing a message back, “Please call me Carmen.” However, I’ll not forget that second kind message. As I was reading it, I was thinking to myself: Woah. I hope I can always be so gracious and attentive to others’ names too.

Peace.

Mystics Summit

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

These stories are a taste of the Mystics Summit sponsored by The Shift Network. Aug 15-19, you’re invited to join for free: https://shiftnetwork.infusionsoft.com/go/mts22a24522/a24522

This summer Father Just-call-me-Greg Boyle and I had a conversation—he’s the white-bearded, plain-spoken, best-selling author, and down-to-earth Jesuit priest who founded and runs Homeboy Industries in LA, the largest gang-intervention, rehabilitation, and re-entry program in the world. To say this conversation was life-changing for me would be an understatement.

Near the end, I asked him did he have a story perhaps that sums up his work. He paused. Then Greg told a story “happened 3 days ago” about tragic death, loss, community, love, and a woman pulling a warm burrito out of her bra. It has to be heard to be appreciated so that’s all I’ll say about it.

Over two weeks I had a 35-to-45-minute conversation with each of these seventeen, in this order: Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Andrea Menard, Father Greg Boyle; Dr. James Finley; Rukmini Chaitanya, Grandmaster Mantak Chia; Dr. William Bloom; Rev. Dr. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, Mike Morrell; Andrew Harvey, Raven Sinclaire, Colette Lafia; Tenley Wallace, Carl McColman; Matthew Fox, Rev. Ana Jones, Mirabai Starr.

When invited to co-host the Mystics Summit for The Shift Network with Mike Morrell, I thought, What a wonderful way to be a student, learn more about spirituality, make new friends, strengthen existing friendships, and have dialogue with those who want the world to be a kinder place. Here’s what I learned.

Since the zoom camera is ultra sensitive, wonderful drivers before each session reminded: “Please don’t talk while the other person is talking, because it switches the camera to you.” Before my 5-4-3-2-1 countdown to start, I’d add my own reassurance to the conversation partner that I’d be listening, albeit quietly, during our time together: “Please know I’m listening very deeply to all you say. I’d rather not switch between mute and unmute, so I’ll resist my Cuban and Southern habits to interject while you talk with ‘Yes, I see,’ ‘Uh-huh,’ ‘How interesting.’ I’ll simply wait for you to pause before I talk again, letting you have the floor so our conversation can unfold organically.”

Turns out, that’s the best way to have a conversation. Chockful of down-to-earth and sometimes surprising stories and always sharing wisdom, these conversations highlighting each person I interviewed and their good work and teaching were also extraordinarily holy and deeply nourishing. Listening is an amazing way to be human. That’s the main thing I learned or rather re-learned.

Here are glimpses into these conversations, in (almost) chronological order:

They are (almost) chronological because my first deep bow is to the amazing inaugural host of the 2021 Mystics Summit, the incomparable Mirabai Starr, whose interview happened to be the final one scheduled. An award-winning author, Mirabai talks about her Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics. Wild Mercy is such a joy to read, or you can listen to her read it (a treat!). Mirabai has also received critical acclaim for her revolutionary new translations of John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul and Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle.

An interspiritual teacher with an amazing gift for cultivating community and for making all feel welcome, Mirabai is a teacher’s teacher, an author’s author, a translator’s translator, and a host’s host. I watched a dozen or more of her brilliant, wise 2021 Mystics Summit interviews in preparation for co-hosting this year’s Summit.

In our conversation, Mirabai wanted to discuss translation as a doorway into sacred presence so we did. She also shares her wisdom about the Divine Feminine, how mystics of the past are accessible to you in your life right now, and how you do NOT have to be perfect to qualify as a living mystic yourself. You’ll also hear how Mirabai still owns and plays the flute she got while a student in Spain.

Rabbi Rami Shapiro is author of over 36 books, including Minyan, Ten Principles for Living a Life of Integrity; The Divine Feminine in Biblical Wisdom Literature, sharing his encounters with Chochma/Sophia; and Holy Rascals, which is another wise book of his describing what he calls a “zero-sum worldview rooted in a Strict Father God theology in which God dominates men, men dominate women, the wealthy dominate the poor and middle class, and humans dominate nature.” Rabbi Rami was so kind in the green room as we checked sound and light levels. Then he said at one point in our conversation, “I’m not really all that interested in God the Father,” and we were friends for life.

In our conversation he describes well our biggest challenges today and how we can go “beyond Big Religion,” which he describes as “organized religion focused on patriarchy, power, and control,” and he shares the Perennial Wisdom at the mystic heart of most all religion as key to our collective sustainable future. These include: All life manifests a dynamic non-dual Aliveness called by many names; we humans are born able to wake up in, with, and as this Aliveness; waking up calls us to the Golden Rule of caring for all other creatures; and this service to being a blessing (think: contributing to the common good of ALL creatures) is our highest calling.

Rabbi Rami shared a very simple exercise to help us embody the compassion of the Divine Mother and that will have you looking at a simple ant in never the same way again. After our conversation we talked about a roly-poly I’d tried and succeeded in not stepping on during my walk that morning, and Rami is the kind of kind person who is genuinely interested in such stories. I sent Rabbi Rami a thank you note after, and a few weeks on, in the mail from Tennessee came a red envelope and inside a cheerful Snoopy card with the kindest note.

In fact, Rabbi Rami is so kind that you start to really imagine that religion can be embodied kindness, a language of living-out being compassionate, or, as he says, “Religions are like languages: no language is true or false; all languages are of human origin; each language reflects and shapes the civilization that speaks it; there are things you can say in one language that you cannot say or say as well in another; and the more languages you speak, the more nuanced your understanding of life becomes.”

That same day Andrea Menard entered the zoom room from Nova Scotia where she is filming the Robyn-Carr-based Sullivan’s Crossing (which will make fans of Virgin River happy). Andrea—known in the Sacred realm as Grandmother Wind—reminds us to slow down, respect, and acknowledge, for example, the traditional territory of the Mi’kmaq (in Nova Scotia), the official knowledge keepers of that territory.

In our conversation, she shared her wisdom as a Métis singer, songwriter, actress, TEDx speaker, facilitator of the rise of the Sacred Feminine, and founder of the Sacred Feminine Learning Lodge. Then she sang LIVE a beautiful bilingual water prayer song in Michif and English from her September-releasing album.

My first day of filming interviews ended with Father Greg Boyle and the warm burrito story. He said, “I’m still laughing three days on,” and I can say I’m still laughing weeks on, thoughtfully.

Next I got to interview Dr. James Finley, former Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where Thomas Merton was his spiritual director. Jim Finley is also a Core Teacher at the Center for Action and Contemplation with Richard Rohr and others, and host of a “monastery in cyberspace,” as he calls it, his podcast, Turning to the Mystics.

Jim wanted to meet a couple of times beforehand via zoom, so we could have a real conversation. I know his work 100% and was thrilled he wanted to meet, and also petrified. The first time he sent me a zoom link an hour beforehand. The first thing he said when I got on, gobsmacked, was “Hey, let me show you the view.” Which put me at ease.

The second time we pre-met, I zoomed in to see Jim in his book-lined, warmly lit study, and he smiled without saying anything, and then held up a legal pad, wrote his phone number on it big, so I called him. “I’ve got to get someone out to look at my connection,” he said, “but I thought we could talk on the phone and see each other on zoom until it’s fixed, if that’s alright,” so we did.

At the end, he and I had such a laugh because since I’d been holding my phone with my left hand the whole time, I did a half-bow of reverent goodbye where the anjali mudra was my right palm pointing skyward and pressed against the imaginary one (occupied by holding my phone to my face so he could hear me explain this). He did one half-bow, one-palm anjali mudra right back to me, laughing, even though he had his cell phone on speaker, lying flat on the table, so he wasn’t holding it.

Jim is so calm, he reminds me of Brother Lawrence in that way. Both have a calmness that is a muscle, produced by invisible spiritual exercises over a lifetime. It’s a calmness all around them can enter.

In between these pre-meetings with Jim, he sent me his teaching memoir, releasing from Orbis in 2023. It’s titled Finding Our Way Along the Healing Path. I read it in a day. Gobbled its pdf up. CAN’T WAIT for it to come out.

In addition to being a raconteur in our conversation, sharing stories that make you feel you yourself have met Thomas Merton in Kentucky, Jim Finley talks so helpfully about how we can learn to recognize and cultivate the stance that offers the least resistance to being overtaken by mystical oneness with God or Love or Mystery, which he describes as a gift always there, available for the taking up. He speaks from profound experiences with trauma. His words resonate in deep ways since he knows and has healed from trauma, and as a clinical psychologist (retired) he has helped countless others healing from trauma. Now he works primarily with adult survivors of trauma who want their spirituality to be a resource in their healing.

As an adult survivor of trauma myself who wants spirituality to be a resource in my ongoing healing, I’m thankful for Dr. James Finley and his beyond-the-binary perspective. And for how he brings trauma in so it can be healed, be healing. Our conversation features Jim saying so many wonderfully human, wonderfully healing things that it rewards both listening and re-listening.

I am so grateful for Jim Finley. He is, as Mirabai Starr says, “a true mystic,” even a “renegade mystic,” and a kind mentor for all.

My next day of interviews took me to the Bahamas and to Thailand, so to speak, conversing with Rukmini Chaitanya and Grandmaster Mantak Chia. Conversing with Rukmini Chaitanya reminds how practice is so tied to our humanness. Rukmini has a PhD from UC Berkeley, a sunny spirit, and accessible teaching. A senior staff member of the Sivananda Ashram Yoga Retreat Bahamas, she is personal assistant to Acharya/spiritual director Swami Swaroopananda. She shares how anxiety at Cal motivated her into yoga practice. With one of THE best recording rooms ever, yellows, blues, and oranges, with a peaceful, breezy Bahamas-feel, Rukmini teaches the Sivananda Yoga Tradition and Advaita Vedanta Philosophy in a wonderfully accessible way.

Grandmaster Mantak Chia was born to a Chinese family in Thailand and raised in a Christian family—he began studying the Buddhist path of mindfulness as a child, and in our conversation he shares stories from his growing up. He also tells the most important lesson taught him by his Taoist master, and teaches the Inner Smile Meditation. I appreciate that it was 7am for Mantak while it was 5pm for me. He got up early so we could have our conversation, and I appreciate his gracious willingness to describe for us the thousands-of-years-old practices still so incredibly relevant for our modern world.

Dr. William Bloom lives in England, and he was and is a joy to talk with. Dr. Bloom is a groundbreaking UK educator in the field of holistic wellbeing and director of the Spiritual Companions Trust. Though he is very down-to-earth, you immediately sense that, as The Independent says, he has “an encyclopaedic knowledge of meditation” and deep experience of it too. He shared his fascinating background story (which includes publishing his first novel at age 22), and check out his story of the blue sky.

William teaches how spiritual and mystic experiences are accessible and natural for everyone. Some of his books include Meditation Masterclass, The Power of Modern Spirituality, Feeling Safe, and The Encyclopedia of Mind, Body, Spirit. We met on the day news was breaking that Boris Johnson had resigned, which reminded me that in an age of political uncertainty, William’s sharing of timeless, practical wisdom has special relevance.

The next day of interviews, I was in the room with Rev. Dr. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza. Dr. Robyn is a Nashville-based, recently married (congrats, Robyn!) storyteller, professor, public theologian and ethicist, and founder of the Activist Theology Project. Dr. Robyn has a lovely poetic description for combining contemplation and action for a stronger community—a “murmuration of becoming.” Their imagination and vision for an ethical future are compelling, down-to-earth, doable. They have ideas for how we can be human, again, and I also got invited for a porch chat in Nashville, with iced tea or bourbon, my choice. Looking forward to that!

Then I was interviewed that same day by co-host Mike Morrell and got to talk about Brother Lawrence and my new translation of this timeless 17th-century Discalced Carmelite friar who transcends any tradition and has been in-print and beloved for centuries by all people, religious or not. My accessible, accurate translation is the first complete offering of this wisdom, the first by a woman of color, the first that includes all passages, and the first to use non-binary pronouns for the Divinity. I hope it will bring everyone peace and joy as it has done and does me.

After, I interviewed The Mystics Summit co-host Mike Morrell. Mike went to beautiful Berry College, the largest in the world at 27,000 green acres with beautiful eagles (eagle cam too) and wonderful teachers, in the same town where I used to teach. Mike is the collaborating author, with Father Richard Rohr, on The Divine Dance, founder of Wisdom Camp, and a founding organizer of the justice, arts, and spirituality festival Wild Goose in North Carolina. His helpful theological mulch metaphor, his creativity, and his stories are worth tuning in for, as well as his generosity of spirit.

Andrew Harvey astounded next. Internationally acclaimed poet, novelist, translator, mystical scholar, and spiritual teacher, author of over 20 books, and founder of the Institute for Sacred Activism, Andrew discusses AND READS FROM beautifully, the astounding work of the great Christian woman mystic, Hadewijch of Antwerp, exploring five of her greatest poems and meditations from his new book Love is Everything: 365 Poems and Meditations from Hadewijch of Antwerp. A 13th-century Beguine, Hadewijch was silenced for five centuries—her voice now returns through Andrew’s brilliant and moving translations, to inspire us all.

Raven Sinclaire is a writer, teacher, and student of Hermetic wisdom. Co-author of the best-selling anthology: Ready, Set, Live! she has an upcoming book: Old Truths/New Light, and is an internationally known workshop and retreat leader. Raven is also currently working on her Master’s degree at the University of Dundee. In our conversation, Raven shares with us stories of her own initiation into wisdom. She also speaks of Hypatia, one of my heroes. Talking with Raven, what most impressed me is how often we overlook the wisdom within, and how she has developed tools and teachings for recovering and engaging with it, and when her Old Truths/New Light Hermetic Wisdom Oracle Deck arrived, I’ve found it both beautiful and deeply helpful. As author Andrew Harvey says, “Raven is authentic, humble, experienced and inspired.”

Colette Lafia is a San Francisco-based writer, spiritual director, and international retreat leader who dropped in next. She has a gentle, joyful spirit. Her book The Divine Heart is a 2022 Nautilus Award winner, and I had the great joy of reading it earlier this year. Of this gem, author and interspiritual teacher Mirabai Starr says, “In this luminous book, spiritual guide Colette Lafia offers the fruits of her tenderly cultivated inner life to feed people of all genders who thirst for a direct encounter with the embodiment of love, which she recognizes as our own true nature.” Colette does spiritual direction both in person and virtually, and in our conversation Colette’s spiritual-directing wisdom shows as she shares down-to-earth ways to listen, grow, and transform as human beings. She draws from her own stories and experiences as a contemplative and gives you very practical steps to experience your life and all of life as a love story. I’m here for that. I also especially appreciate that Colette teaches a stance of self-acceptance. Her abundant, clear teachings are very practical for everyone who wants more abiding peace and joy in their lives.

Next Tenley Wallace danced into our conversation. Now in Oregon and once from the Bay Area, she and I share this geographical connection. To prepare for our interview, I watched a few of Tenley’s dances online, and they are incredible. Tenley describes herself as a midwife for women’s transformation through dance, yoga, and ancient yogini wisdom from India, Tibet, and Nepal. And even that just scratches the surface of what she’s done and is doing. Tenley is a translator of ancient wisdom, having studied intensively with yoginis, and she has created original embodiment practices for anyone wanting to live with more confidence, grace, and power. Please look up her videos on YouTube to see what I mean! She concludes our conversation with a brief, easy practice that anyone can do at any time to pause and reconnect with their true self.

My friend Carl McColman kindly came on that day after a long stretch of traveling and leading a retreat in New York. Carl is a spiritual director, retreat leader, and author of The Big Book of Christian Mysticism, and many others, including Eternal Heart: The Mystical Path to a Joyful Life and Unteachable Lessons: Why Wisdom Can’t Be Taught (and Why That’s Okay)—it must be “caught” instead.

An internationally known speaker and teacher on mystical spirituality and contemplative living, Carl also co-hosts with Cassidy Hall and Kevin Johnson, Encountering Silence, a podcast about, well, one of my favorite subjects: SILENCE. They listen to (and speak with) everyone there—Amy Frykholm, Nikki Grimes, The Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, Dr. Beverly Lanzetta, Sister Joyce Rupp, Kevin Quashie, and Barbara Brown Taylor, to name just a few. You can tune in here: http://encounteringsilence.com/

In our conversation, my sage friend Carl talks of the inspiring and instructive life and wisdom of theologian Howard Thurman, how mysticism corrects the religion of dour moralism, and how it inspires social and communal transformation as well. We had a good conversation and hope you’ll join us!

My last day of interviews were with Matthew Fox, Rev. Ana Jones, and Mirabai Starr. If you wanted to go out with a bang, that’s how to do it.

Though he never uses these prefixes much, Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox makes a conversation resemble how the world feels after a parching summer meets rain—the steam that rises from the red earth like magic, the earthy smell of petrichor that fills your nose and body with its fragrance, and the feeling of lightness, like anything is possible, and you’re sure you just spotted a green shoot growing from that bare patch over there—that’s Matthew Fox.

What do I love about Matthew Fox? First, that he had slides of Hildegard’s colorful mandalas to talk about during our conversation: “Egg of the Universe,” “The Human as Microcosm of the Macrocosm,” “Cosmic Tree Cultivation,” and “All Beings Celebrate Creation.” He points out, by the way, in “Cosmic Tree Cultivation” the snake in the border and how Hildegard saw snakes as good, which is also my understanding of snakes, one reason I wear a ouroborous ring made of recycled white gold.

I started our conversation by holding up my dog-eared copy of Matthew’s Illuminations of Hildegard of Bingen in tribute to his decades of being my and so many others’ mentor. Mirabai Starr describes him best: “There is not another man on the planet who has championed the sacred feminine with a fraction of the wisdom, scholarship, creative fire, and holy chutzpah as Matthew Fox.”

Via the lens of the Webb Telescope, Matthew asks us: “Might this sharing of the earliest galaxies and stars beaming into our living rooms awaken us to the sacredness of our 13.8 billion year journey?” He turns to “feminist theologian” Hildegard of Bingen, whom he also calls “the grandmother of the Rhineland mystics,” and “a Trojan horse in the Vatican,” because she centers creation and her love of Nature in her viriditas or greening theology, as does Matthew in his Creation Spirituality. (We remember that Pope Benedict silenced Matthew for a time for speaking out on behalf of the Divine Feminine and for Mother Earth.)

Matthew also discusses how the ancient Mesoamerican teaching recognizes the compassionate Divine Feminine: “To be human one must make room in one’s heart for the wonders of the universe.” That reminds me of Death Valley: Life Blooms on PBS, where we follow Baratunde Thurston and time-lapse photographer Harun Mehmedinovic, who talks of how important it is to see the stars, for the wonder of it, and how light pollution prevents us from that experience more and more. I got teary-eyed myself as Matthew described the Webb Telescope scientists getting teary-eyed seeing the awe-inspiring, awesome photographs.

Matthew and I had a laugh near the end after he’d been sharing lyrically about Genesis 1’s Original Blessing, Creation’s birthright of goodness and our interdependence on all creatures. He pointed out how much of theology starts unfortunately with Genesis 2 and an unhealthy Original Sin that has historically made for a narcissistic theology of self-loathing, one where we’ve forgotten the goodness and the sacred nature of Nature that we meant to honor and protect, and from that sacred focus, develop an economic system that works for all beings.

I followed up with something like: “I appreciate how you’ve spent—are devoting—your whole life trying to glue Chapter 1 back into Genesis.” He laughed, and we agreed that super glue might be needed.

My penultimate interview was with Rev. Ana Jones. (Ana is said to rhyme with “Amma.”) Rev. Ana Jones is an internationally renowned Interfaith Minister who speaks to ways that we can listen to the still small voice of intuition. Being with her, you can’t help but notice that she has a profound calmness and optimism. She brings into our conversation allusions to many religious writings that deepen her practices. Ana also shares insightful personal stories, and we see that what she teaches, she lives. Ana helps us better understand what intuition is and how to listen to it, teaches that we need everyone’s inner mystic and intuitive gifts to be honed for co-creating a better and brighter future, and reads a beautiful poem as a benediction. With Facebook communities of over 450,000 members, Ana’s inclusive, listening approach resonates with many and gives me hope.

I am thankful to have worked on this Mystics Summit with so many amazing people. And this is just half of it! Mike interviewed such wonderful souls, including Banafsheh Sayyad, Bushi Yamato Damashii, Alexander John Shaia, Taya Mâ Shere, Rebekah Berndt, Kabir Helminski, Hillary Raining, Tripp Fuller, Micky ScottBey Jones (she/her), Sophie Strand, Juliet Rania, Rabbi Jay Michaelson, Gareth Higgins, Therese Taylor-Stinson, Tada Hozumi, and others, whom I’m also looking forward to tuning into. May you all enjoy all of this wonderful feast!

These stories are a taste of the Mystics Summit sponsored by The Shift Network. It’s August 15-19, join for free here: https://shiftnetwork.infusionsoft.com/go/mts22a24522/a24522

Thank you! Peace to all,

Carmen

Brown

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

“Look. They’re brown.”

This whisper glides effortlessly across the bituminous tarmac with the lazy downward drift of a paper airplane perfectly creased then released. It sounds astonished, not malicious. Escaping with crystal clarity under the cracked-open glass of a narrow, five-foot-long steel-awning schoolroom window, it reaches the Fiver-like, olive-skinned ears of a skinny eleven-year-old, whose bony shoulders have already begun hunching for other reasons. For one, she’s an introvert who loves books. Hearing this surprisingly feral, disembodied curiosity, they inch an indiscernible fraction more in the direction of the cloudless sky, as she and her family navigate a scorching asphalt parking lot, a patch of melting blackness stranded smackdab in seemingly endless, green, cow-grazing pastures.

With each step, left then right, new sneakers reluctantly leave the sunned and sticky surface with a slight suck-suck sound.

She focuses her gaze resolutely forward, refusing a strong impulse to look left where the long pushed-out window is, but all the same she feels unseen eyes on her and her two sisters.

Her ears burn.

“ÆSˈ ə veɪdʌ.”

“HⱭTˈ pəˈteɪˌtʌ.”

“OƱˈ sʌˈvi doʊ.”

That’s roll call. I wince and pull the corners of my lips up and go along. It’s one reason today I pay attention to how my students’ names are pronounced.

It’s / Ɑˈ səˈveɪ doʊ /, I would say now.

At that point, though, we’re the only Acevedo in the White pages of the phone book. When I check, twelve by then, I don’t need another reason outside my own changing body to make me feel alien and not belonging, but there it is. 

This changing makes me self-conscious because it feels like a threat. My bones warn, You drew the short gender straw. My mind asks how long I’ll evade the consequence by choosing too-big t-shirts that bury tender, growing peaks brushing up against their cotton, simultaneously thrilling and scaring me in a society signaling they will not be mine.

At home in the blue-green foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, I grow up eating steaming plates of fried chicken with collard greens and arroz con pollo, not at the same meal. My family and I fork fried liver and onions into mashed potatoes, and spoon black beans with rice and pork. We devour hot fluffy biscuits, we consume fried ripe plantains. We eat salty beef stew, we have spicy chicken fricassee. We enjoy homemade lemon meringue pies, and caramelized flan.

I drink gallons of ice-cold sweet brown tea. I mean Petticoat Junction water towers of it. Also as a kid visiting my dad’s relatives in Miami, I’m granted a grown-up’s breakfast that stars a hot demitasse cup filled to the brim with espresso-shot café con leche, and to the side, toasted Cuban bread for dunking. That is heaven.

Then for lunch we go out with an aunt who always wears bright colors and perfume even to a corner store for some Cuban sandwiches. That simple, underestimated combination of Cuban bread with ham, pork, cheese, pickles, mustard sets a never surpassed standard for sandwich excellence. In between meals, my cousins sneak my brother and me sugary contraband chunks of gritty dark-red guava paste sandwiched between impossibly thick, wonderfully creamy slices of sharply savory orange cheese.

My father and me
My mother and me

With a White mother and a Brown father, I’m born into multiculturalism. At first it means summer trips to Florida from Georgia, a hardworking, taking-nothing-for-granted, overcompensating, flamboyant, brave grandfather who has a thick accent and difficulty with plurals, a different skin tone from those around me, and more, delicious food choices.

It becomes that happy energy I love when my aunts and uncles are all talking at once sitting on the front steps after supper, becoming more animated as the light goes and filling the night air in Little Havana with one “¡Mira!” and “¡Claro que sí!” after another, and smoke curling up from waved cigarettes. It’s being kissed on one cheek, then the other, often, hugged and patted by everybody.

It’s the flickering strangeness of tall votive candles lit and left burning at all hours, with figures on them like a woman looking down, eyes closed, her hands pressed together, dressed in a colorful robe from head to toe, short yellow-orange rays outlining her body. It is also on display on a table in one uncle’s TV room—the biggest, heaviest, loveliest round glass bottle I’ve ever seen, holding a darker-than-tea liquid, and when the sun shines through the window, it looks like amber, but the label on it reads R-U-M.

My skin is not as dark as my Miami cousins’ nor even my father’s Café Bustelo café-con-chocolate tone, since mine has a splash of my mother’s milk and of his mother’s added to it. I’m neither this nor that, but I love my olive hue, write about it in my journals, and feel very Brown looking at those around me.

This mixed-race background, and my gender, are not a fit for the 1970s-1980s South. I look and look for my place. Exclusively run by one end of the Fitzpatrick scale, and by strict commands in Genesis for some to “rule over” me, this world affords me scant space.

But my brave, indefatigably cheerful, hardworking mother faithfully makes PTA phone calls, organizes school fundraisers, bakes endless pound cakes that squeak, cleans up after Halloween school fests, keeps babies in the church nursery, and always makes time to do whatever others ask of her. The community’s respect for her many contributions plus her pigmentation largely protect me.

I thought even then, Others live differently from me—is so fascinating. It makes me feel alive tasting strangely sweet, sandy guava paste for the first time between two smooth slices of tangy cheese. It’s what I think going to school should be like, truly learning, without the torturous spelling tests and other challenges. Multiculturalism experienced as family and self is my first inoculation against society’s suffocating, and inherently violent binary codes.

The main discrimination for me—gender. Two exist then, one strong, one weak. One free, one government-legislated. One virile, one hysterical. I see a future of dishwashing, cooking, and diaper-changing ahead of me. A curtain coming down at the end of a play. Early on I sense that to complain about each unfairness will require constant interruption, incur punishment, and I’ll never get to do the things I want, so I know my place and stay in it, and work like the devil.

This prejudice is mainlined three times a week when my parents take my younger brother and two sisters and me on Wednesday nights and twice on Sundays—with the precision of an addiction—to a Southern Baptist church. Women are not equal with men there. This inequality does not make a person feel like a person.

We’re the only mixed-race family in the pews under that sharply white steeple. My mother and brother look local, she teases the mailman must’ve come through, but the rest of us are decidedly other. Still, my handsome father, who looks a lot like a Cuban Elvis Presley, becomes a glad-handing deacon and gets to stand solemn at the end of pews, one brown hand over the other, both resting where his jacket buttons, waiting straight as a sentry for the gleaming shallow dish, heavy with quarters, to make its way back.

During long church services dark suits stride cleanly up the steps to the pulpit to speak. Often they scream at me with authority. Decreeing women are made inferior by God and are required by divine law to be subservient to their husbands. In Sunday School I’m trained in Evangelical womanhood, which is that the highest, most noble possibility in life is marriage to a man, serving him as my superior; children shall follow, and the woman shall raise them.

As a child, this arrangement puzzles me to no end. If God is loving, how could he make me less-than someone else? Why do just men speak from raised places of power? Why do they shout angrily at me in church, towering over everyone else, while quiet women are always invisibly working, doing things behind-the-scenes that keep the church ticking over?

These questions have never been answered.

My school years are a mess. That likely makes me a kinder teacher.

We move once every two years or so, as my father has difficulty holding a job, and I find it hard to form new friendships that often.

As a student, I always feel wrong, incapable. Reading seems impossible. The words will not stay still. They float in and right back out. Letters switch places, s and c, d and b. Also words like now, no, know. I can’t focus. Standardized reading tests are the worst experience. They make my brain seize and halt. You have to read a passage you have no relationship to, like some jargon-laden textbook excerpt, which wouldn’t intimidate me today, but as a high school student, I’m caught in an undertow. At home we have Reader’s Digest, Guideposts, plus Billy Graham’s Angels on the lid of the toilet tank.

I get in trouble for talking in class. I have several years where I must have been such an annoying student. I try to remember that now, as a teacher. There’s even a black-and-white elementary school photo where I’m turned around talking to someone behind me. In another city a teacher puts me out in the hallway, right beside the classroom door, and the rite of passage is that kids file by on their way to the lunchroom and snicker and point. Even earlier, I’m sitting on a bench waiting for my mother to come pick me up, lucking out since she drove my father to work that day and has the car, and the memory is of soaked underpants and the soggy back of a Singer-sewn dress sticking to the cold metal, making me shiver.

I don’t begin to understand these failures until I’m helping a student who describes his difficulties with reading, which I silently notice resemble my earlier ones, and he says, “I have dyslexia.” I’ve never heard that word before, or if I have, it hasn’t registered. Next I happen on “Words Failed, Then Saved Me” by poet Philip Schulz in the New York Times, describing his late-diagnosed dyslexia, and it resonates. I’m like Ah, I see. I’m well into middle age, too, when I begin to have some compassion for my struggling childhood self.

Today the letters and words rarely switch places, but on occasion they do so gently, without impeding my reading much now. But from kindergarten through college, and beyond to a Ph.D., undiagnosed dyslexia causes me untold grief. I cannot focus and am always anxious. I never sit down to a college test that I’m not holding one hand over my stomach as cramps begin an hour before it and only subside that evening, only to start again with the next test.

Still, I have a deep well of stubbornness, which turns out to be useful. I like books, I just can’t read well. So I read and read and read. One of my favorites is Watership Down. It’s hard going, but life-altering experiences like identifying with the puny rabbit with a sixth sense are what keep me pushing and very gradually allow the act of moving my eyes over printed pages to become one of my greatest joys.

But I remain frustrated for years, watching as friends nail perfect SAT scores and big scholarships to expensive schools. My standardized test scores lag. It’s embarrassing.

My friends have firm plans to go to college. I envy them. Studying is painful, hard, and slow, but I want to go to college too. I’m chopping coleslaw at Granny’s Fried Chicken when my father says to me: “You can’t go to college. I’ve got three more kids after you. I can’t afford it. Don’t ask me again.”

We live in an unincorporated community called Macedonia, near the then equally small town of Canton, Georgia, which doesn’t have a movie cinema. We have well water. It’s soft on hair but bad on teeth. I love our neighbors Hoyt and Earcell, they raise chickens and garden, and let me ramble for hours over their rolling green pastures and woods whenever I am sad or bored or need to flee problems at home, walking miles with only the red-tailed hawks soaring overhead for company. But I itch to see more of the world.

Some teachers help me, and I do the work. Even though I see no progress. What else is there? Behind my father’s back, I apply to colleges, paying for the fees with money from my fast-food job, hoping scholarships will happen that will enable me to go to school; otherwise, I cannot go.

Miraculously they do. I choose the school that offers me the most money. It’s an award-winning liberal arts college offering small class sizes, each not over twenty students, and individual teacher attention for every student. The downside is it’s only two hours from my home in northwest Georgia, but it’s a start, a chance.

Once there, however, I feel awkward. I’m on academic and need-based scholarships and do work-study as a secretary to pay for the expensive books. I type for a professor while many classmates drive new cars. Kind teachers, friends who overlook my oddities, like the semester I wear blue bib overalls solidly, and my doggedness somehow see me through.

My sophomore year brings an unexpected freedom. My Cuban grandfather shoehorns people’s feet into espadrilles and brocades and Oxfords and boots and sneakers and more at a department store, and when he shoehorns enough pumps onto middle-aged women’s callused feet, flashes his mustachioed grin, and charms them into purchases with his enthusiasm, he’s able to buy his long-awaited Oldsmobile Delta 88, and gives me his ten-year-old, faded green Vega. I feel like I am driving a Cadillac. I’m so happy, I don’t care I must turn the AC off to go more than 10 mph up hills, or that it requires me to store quarts of oil in the back and chug in one or more every other time I fill up with gas, or that sometimes it belches heavy white smoke, sometimes black, causing one motorist to shake his fist at me through the fog.

When Ortega (the Vega) dies a few years later, I get a used, dark blue metallic Chevy Chevette hatchback. It looks how a car would if it were mimicking a sneeze, the tiny wheels especially. It, a teaching assistantship, suppers of tuna, canned mixed vegetables, baked potatoes, sometimes Ramen for variation, and not otherwise shopping, for my mother keeps making my dress clothes, carry me through grad school in Athens.