Atti the Gleek

Tell me this kid isn’t a musical prodigy. Look at Atti showing his mashup skills. He started off with “I Am Like a Star Shining Brightly,” went into “Twinkle, Twinkle,” back to “Shining Brightly,” into “I Am a Child of God,” back to “Shining Brightly,” but this time with a key change, added a little soul to “I Am a Child of God” before breaking it down with “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,” and bringing it all back around to where he started with the last part of “Shining Brightly.”

Personally, I think it’s inspired.

I’m now an award winning troublemaker

Nightlife
This past weekend I ran off to Utah (via Orange County for the longest possible way to go, but also for free childcare) to attend the Salt Lake City Weekly party for the recipients of the 2011 Best of Utah award. Mine was as a board member of WAVE, the advocacy group I helped found, and the staff of the newspaper liked us so much they invented a category for us. Best Mormon Feminist.

I didn’t know what to expect, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t need an acceptance speech or anything, but it turned out to be a party at a club with free food and booze. I got no food, and was interested in no booze, so I missed out on that, but I brought my cousin friend Karen and we had a blast living it up like two single girls on the town. I even got hit on at the party, and since I’ve been developing a bit of a complex about my momma frump, that did the old girl some good.

We left the party and had a beautiful meal like you’d see on Top Chef, slept in late the next morning, went shopping, had another long lunch, and then Karen left and I got another day to sleep in, lay about the room, meet with some other friends, and get away from worrying about anybody else’s needs for a while. It was pretty dang luxurious.

Shut yer Pie Hole
I was so honored to represent the rest of us mouthy broads that make up the WAVE board, and I will now have a plaque on my wall declaring me the Best Mormon Feminist, if that ever comes up for debate. But I’m not really sure that my troublemaking needs to be encouraged.

Tharce-Gulu

I’m so proud of the work I’ve been doing as a board member of THARCE-Gulu, a charity to help the war affected people of Gulu, Uganda. It has completely taken up my life this year, but the work is so important and the opportunities so great.

Uganda has suffered more than most places on the planet as they’ve lived with the effects of colonialism, psychotic despots, attacks from evil rebel leaders, kidnapped children used as soldiers, sexual slavery, and extreme poverty. As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, it especially pricks my heart to email with the leaders of the church there in Uganda. My brothers and sisters in this gospel have been through nightmares. Knowing that we share this background makes it personal to me. I feel like it is not just my Christian obligation to help, but a covenant I made to God when I was baptized.

It took so so many hours, but we’ve been able to take all our good intentions, all the suggestions from our friends in Uganda, and build an organization around it. As I type this our president is landing in Uganda to buy the land that the future center will be built on. A center for the people of the community to use as a place to recover from the trauma of war, get access to mental health services, benefit from visiting experts in music, dance, sports, art, and filmmaking therapy, and recover some of the opportunities that were lost to them during this decades long war.

Thanks to having a talented and passionate friend, we’re already getting a lot of attention for our efforts. I spent this whole year working on the website and I launched it just a few weeks ago.

Please check out the site, read up on what we’re doing, and donate.

www.tharcegulu.org

Living Room Art Wall, Part 2

First half of artwork wall
Ready for more of the tour? This is the side I’ve had for the longest. I thought I’d just weight the pictures towards one side of the wall, but I didn’t love it. And the nesting impulse was just begging for more to do, so I kept right on going all the way across. But these images are really what started it all.

The lovers
The Lovers by seller Delany LaFae. This photographer is the same one who did the Sunday Afternoon picture from last time. She was having a 2 for 1 sale, so after finding the picture of the books and tea I looked through her shop to find my free one and came upon this picture I loved even more. Talk about mushy love art. She visits these trees several times throughout the year and takes pictures of them in different seasons. This one was my favorite – in the rain.

home
Home Sweet Home by seller benben. More amazing illustration. This picture has a place of honor right in the middle because it’s such a beautiful symbol of our foremost goal for our home. That it’s a place of sanctuary. I’m nuts about the modern graphic treatment of such an old fashioned ideal.

Hope letterpress
Hope letterpress by seller Sweet Harvey. You all know how I feel about letterpress. This artist is a great one and I fell totally in love with the sentiment behind this work.

owl on dictionary page
Owl from seller Little Rice There are a whole lot of etsy shops printing images on vintage dictionary pages. I love owls as a symbol of wisdom, so this one seemed like a perfect fit.

Atti with wonder
This is one of my favorite pictures of Atti I’ve ever taken and the only family photo to make the wall. I just love his little face looking so full of wonder, gazing out into his future. Plus he looks so handsome with his olive colored eyes.

And lastly,

Gethsemane
Gethsemane by artist J. Kirk Richards. This piece is really special to me. I could probably write an entire post just about this one. It’s my lone non-etsy purchase, mainly because most non-etsy artists are out of my price range. Richards offers some of his artwork as open stock prints so I was able to get this one really affordably. Despite being a religious person, I don’t have any religious artwork in my home. Everything I’ve seen just didn’t really move me. So much of it is so ubiquitous that they’re almost like family photos, I couldn’t find anything that felt, well, transcendent.

Then I found this piece and was moved by it. But even better, I saw that angel and it looked markedly feminine to me. I’ve been in love ever since. It made me remember this pivotal experience I had as a kid that may have been the moment I embraced feminism. I was reading about Christ in the garden of Gethsemane and of the angel that attended him in his hour of greatest need. As a young, earnest, emotional, teenager I read that and wished that I could have been that angel. I told someone about that wish and they said, “It couldn’t have been you. It would have had to have been someone who had the Priesthood.” That reaction broke my little teenage heart and led me to challenge those views ever since. And I had forgotten all about that experience until I saw that painting.

I’m so pleased with how this project has turned out. I think you can get a good sense of what is important to our family. Education, home, faith, wonder, knowledge, humor, courage, a lot of love, and some cats.

Seen elsewhere…

While I’m nursing my lack of crafting mojo, I thought I’d better do a roundup of some of the other things I’ve done around the web that popped up while I was busy playing with peppermint and gumdrops.

Patheos is a great website discussing religion, and I joined in with a bunch of friends and colleagues to wrestle with the question of Mormon feminism. If you’re not a Mormon it’s going to be a whole lot of inside baseball, but I think these intersections of progression and tradition are fascinating, so maybe you will to.

A Mormon Feminist Symposium

Of more direct interest to this crowd is a massive five hour podcast I did with my friend John Delin from Mormon Stories. Mormon Stories is a wonderful podcast that directly addresses some of the challenging aspects of religious practice, particularly our unique stripe of it. There is some very frank discussion of some things, like polygamy or the priesthood ban for black men, that many devout members prefer to not deal with. If that’s you, then some of these discussions may be challenging to listen to. I find incredible value in facing them, but my way is not the only way, so be advised.

During my interview we talk about my childhood, my testimony of crafting, feminism, working with the teenagers, why I stay a Mormon, and a whole host of other things. It’s a long conversation and if you listen to it you will know more about me than you ever wanted to.

Mormon Stories

Healing the World

Lina and Elisabeth

I’m sad this picture came out blurry, but if winter light is hard, Boston winter light is the hardest, and I’m just grateful I have a record of meeting my new Sister, Lina.

Lina is Ugandan and a tireless, heroic, advocate for peace and security and opportunities for women. Her country has been tortured by dictators for longer than I’ve been alive, first with the notorious Idi Amin, and then by Joseph Kony, a rebel leader who calls his army the Lord’s Liberation Army and has led a civil war against the Ugandan government, first motivated by ethnic conflicts and now by just his madness and lust for power, for the last 20 years.

You have probably been hearing in the media about the atrocities happening in Darfur. Ethnic cleansing, child soldiers, women kidnapped and used as sex slaves. Darfur is in Sudan, a bordering country to Uganda, and Joseph Kony has had training and support by forces in Sudan. What is happening in Darfur is happening in Northern Uganda, but without as much attention.

Currently a tentative peace has been made, Kony is hiding in Congo, the country neighboring Uganda on the other side, and now aid groups can come to Uganda to support the victims he has left behind.

Judy
This is my other new sister, Judy. Judy is a well-known human rights advocate and professor working in the field of international development. She has traveled the world and seen that women are so often left behind in peace building.

She traveled to Uganda with her college students in an effort to rebuild homes destroyed in war, and what she found galvanized her to action.

Sexual assault is so common here in the US, that chances are good that if you haven’t been assaulted, someone close to you has, so think about what that person has been through. Think about the emotional toll assault has taken on them, the shame, the loss of self-worth, the physical healing, maybe eating disorders, suicide attempts or other evidence of psychological trauma.

Now imagine feeling all that in an area where you are lucky if you have a home. Where you suffer from the effects of poverty, your family has been killed, and you have been cast out by your community for fear that the man who assaulted you will punish them. You are alone, raising several children who were conceived by rape, and you are no more than 25 years old.

I watched the video interview of one woman who had been kidnapped at 10 years old and made one of Joseph Kony’s “wives,” her childhood literally stolen. During the years she should have been in school learning to read and write, she was in the African bush being tortured by a madman. She is now raising the children she bore as a child in the wilderness, and struggling to find peace and security. I saw other people, survivors and former child soldiers, overcoming the worst atrocities human beings can inflict on one another, their faces bearing witness to the horrors of what they had lived through.

I was so moved by what I saw, I couldn’t sit still. I could not look at that woman and explain to her that I was too busy to help because I hadn’t vacuumed that week. We don’t all have the opportunity to get deeply involved in this cause, but when the opportunity came to me, I could not walk away from it.

I’ve since come to believe that this is part of the work the Lord has for me to do. With less than a week’s notice I managed to arrange a nearly week-long cross country trip with just two phone calls. Everything fell into place miraculously. After my week in Boston meeting with the board, it became plain that the skills I have are what they needed. Not just my OCD organizing skills and web experience, but even my crafting as we come up with items these women can make that would sell here in the states.

I have a lot more work ahead of me, but I think this will also give me the perspective I need. I think I’ll be able to stop beating myself up for something like the state of my yard when I’m working towards something so very important.

Ahhhhhh.

Brilliant women

By now you may have picked up on the occasional note of desperation in my blogging. A little exhaustion, feeling spread a wee bit thin. This year has been the most demanding and rewarding year in my life, and it left me feeling at a very low ebb in my emotional resources. This weekend was just the recharge that I needed.

I went to the Mormon Women’s Forum Counterpoint Conference. They invited me to speak on the work I’ve been doing for WAVE, and so I got to spend the weekend hanging out with my feminist heroes, my dear friends, and surround myself in this supportive community that extended me blessings and love and every good thing.

The writing and activism stuff I’ve been doing has been so rewarding to me, but it is emotionally costly. This weekend I felt all of that emotion I’ve been putting out given back to me in the most beautifully tender ways.

I’ve also learned about an exciting new charity that I feel compelled to get involved with. Judy Dushku, that beautiful silver fox in the photo, runs an African charity for survivors of war trauma. I’ll write up a better post in the future, but it was so personally meaningful to me, and so incredibly moving, that after her speech I had to just go up to her, hold her hands, and say, “I want in.”

Which seems to be leaving my mouth a lot these days. I’ve also been pitching in a little bit behind the scenes of a really wonderful magazine for Mormon women, Exponent II, and my friends there have tried to protect me from myself by volunteering to go easy on me. But I can’t help myself. There’s a lot in this world I care about and I want to be involved in all of it.

I had a former bishop who used to always say, “A change is as good as a rest.” When someone would get exhausted and frustrated by volunteering in one capacity, he’d ask them to volunteer somewhere else. He did this with his kids too. When they would whine about doing yard work, he’d send them inside to fold laundry. A change of environment, a use of different muscles, could be just as comforting as taking a break and twice as productive. This is a principle that works in my life. I get exhausted with fighting bureaucracy for Atti’s care, so I write something, and when I get sick of writing something, I make something. It’s a careful balancing act, but it is FAR more rewarding than taking a nap.

In order to pull it off, I just need to relish the weekends I get like this last one, surrounded by friends who cheer me on and prove to me where the true rewards in life are.

Atti’s First Rally

Atti and Bear

Friday night my family bundled up and drove the hour and a half into the city to join a rally being held to stand up against the suicide of GLBT teens. It was conducted by a partnership of groups concerned with GLBT issues, but the group I was familiar with was Affirmation: Gay and Lesbian Mormons.

Standing up to suicide
In my younger days, I was no stranger to rallies of all kinds. Getting married and moving as often as we have made that kind of involvement less convenient. Getting older has also made things more complicated as so very few things seem as clear cut as they used to, but I am an activist at heart.

Candles

As a gay loving Mormon, I have been so deeply conflicted over the past few years. I have many gay loved ones. So many that I don’t think it’s coincidental. I have come to believe that God leads me to my gay friends to show them His love. I have wrestled and wrestled with God about this issue, and I believe that it is my job to just offer the love I have to my gay friends and let Him sort out everything else.

Candlelight March
Friday night we listened to speeches and then walked with our candles through the streets of San Francisco. I got so emotional as I walked behind the stroller, watching Atti bounce up and down with excitement, and thought about these children who had killed themselves. It wasn’t that long ago that their own mother’s pushed them in strollers. And now they are gone.

On this issue we should all agree: no one should be made to feel so hopeless and without worth that they think God would rather they kill themselves than be gay. I just hope that no matter our political or religious points of view, we can remember the very real feelings of our brothers and sisters, and reach out in love first. The costs are so very very high.

2010 Year of Pleasures #33

New Books!

One of the great things about trips to Utah is getting to go to thrift and used book stores and pick up some amazing books for nothing, and not have to pay big shipping costs.

Outside of the “Mormon belt” of Utah, Arizona and Idaho, it can be really tough to find great books on Mormon topics. Especially older ones. So my first day in town I made sure to stock up and I got some fabulous things for a total steal.

New books, and a bargain. This should count as two yearly pleasures.

Living the Single Life

If some all powerful person were to come to me and say, OK Tresa, you have 4 days that are all your own. How would you like to spend them? I don’t know that I would have much to add to how my trip actually panned out. My week in Utah was rejuvenating on every level. I stayed, all by myself as it turned out, in the most gorgeous condo I’ve ever seen. A condo with incredible interior design and a view of the city to die for. I got in late Tuesday night, and the first thing I did was take a long bath with a good book.

Courthouse

The conference didn’t start until Wednesday night, so I had a whole day in the city to myself. I slept in as late as I could, took my time getting ready, then took a walk downtown to meet my sister for lunch at a fantastic bakery where I got a gourmet grilled cheese sandwich with caramelized onions and sun-dried tomatoes, and took an enormous box of pastries back to the condo. Then it started raining. There is very little better than the smell of rain hitting dry concrete. Smells like home to me.

SLC fountain

We made our way to a nearby used bookstore, where they happened to be selling a bible owned by Joseph Smith (for a measly 1.5 million.) Typically the bible is kept under glass, but we walked in right when news crews arrived so we got to watch as the owner of the store turned through the pages to show us a better view.

Joseph Smith Bible

We ran back to my sister’s house to pick up the kids and get a quick visit with them. They are so my sister’s children. Free spirits, funny, unabashed love bombs.

Visiting my niece

Then the luxurious vacation part of my trip ended, and it was time to get to work. I spent the next three days engaged in intense conversation with some of the greatest minds and biggest hearts I have ever even heard of. It is so rewarding to come to a place full of such incredible people and be so thoroughly appreciated. I am so grateful to discover this online community of people wrestling with the faith we share with their whole might mind and strength. It is inspiring, and challenges me to keep doing more. Striving to be more honest in my head and in my heart, and more accepting of all the different roads we all walk.

Intense conversation

I am so happy to be home and craving every chance I can get to nestle together in the arms of my family. Going away is wonderful, but it always reminds me how happy I am with what I have.