Hasta La Gadget!

Back in March, OWC released their first SSDs that were compatible with mid-2013 and later MacBooks. Normally, this wouldn’t even be worth mentioning, except for the fact that these were the only aftermarket drives that were compatible with these laptops. Unfortunately, they did come with one small issue, that annoyed those wanting to run Windows on their laptops. Since Apple … Continue reading

Most of us have had our hearts broken, and sometimes we broke someone else’s heart. Generally we’re not that well equipped to have a compassionate relationship to bruised hearts. We feel helpless before someone else’s pain. We feel clumsy. Sometimes we put on a feisty face, a hurt face, or a game “I don’t care” face. We armor up. Now, there are many circumstances when armor is necessary. Exposing where we are wounded isn’t always healthy. Surrendering our armor doesn’t work that well until we are strong enough. There is such a thing as healthy denial. Spilling the beans prematurely can imbed trauma more deeply.

In working with post-traumatic stress disorders, or PTSD, most professionals now agree that going back into the memory of the horror that happened too soon can be damaging. It can re-traumatize. Rather than healing the trauma, the damage is burned deeper into the nervous system. Many veterans of war never reveal what they saw and went through. Retelling becomes re-experiencing, and the experience is just too much. But they have rich, rewarding, compassionate lives nevertheless.

Rarely is it wise to aggressively dissolve the guardians we have needed to protect our hearts. When we’re too impatient and adamant, the heart just feels more threatened. Still, it takes energy to hide the heart. We don’t always know when we’re ready to bring our bruised heart out of its protective shadow. But our soul knows when, and something inside us begins to shift. The energy and desire that has been in limbo can then be returned to be available to our life force. The bruised part of our heart is very much part of the wholeness of our heart.

The tricky thing is that this shifting is for the most part uncomfortable. It requires a time for mourning.

There is a wonderful story told by the Benedictine monk and teacher, Brother David Steindl-Rast. He points out that if we can somehow manage to let our heart break all the way, our heart can break open. Brother David has a problem with nosebleeds. One winter that problem climaxed at Christmas Mass. Brother David is a Benedictine monk, and he wears white at services. At the perfect moment during Mass his nose just blasted open and he was a bloody mess. Afterwards, he visited a trusted friend to talk about what had happened. His friend said something like, “Brother David, I must say this. You stick your nose in a lot of things that break your heart. But you don’t always know how to let your heart break, so your nose bleeds instead.”

Brother David was honest in the telling of this story. He was not always able to yield to that degree, but those times he managed to let his heart break all the way, his nose did indeed stop bleeding.

I love this story. How many times when I am surprised by an incident and I fear my heart might break, do I reflexively go numb, or I get tense and tight, and I want to run? The story helps me to pause, to take a moment to let myself be disturbed without rushing into all the devices I use to avoid the moment: interpretation, thoughts of fixing or blaming, grasping for explanations of cause and effect, all these familiar things I can use to avoid the experience of what my heart actually needs the most-to cry cleanly.

Truthfully, I can’t claim to know when it’s best to allow my heart to break all the way, or when I would be better off to abide within my protective reflexes. I sometimes can’t tell when I am not ready to surrender or if feeling too much would be damaging. But I have learned that there are indeed times when I get more value by letting myself feel the whole thing. So I gather myself and go into the storm. And I abide until the storm passes through, and I am left in a mysterious, unexpected, inexplicable, peace.

I’ve even found that sometimes what breaks my heart can in time open a gateway to becoming even more loving. In those times, by not running, grace catches me.

There is pain that is just part of having an open heart. This pain of the open heart is intrinsic to being connected, compassionate and accepting. But it’s so very easy to create extra suffering on top of the already complex feelings that come with simple vulnerability. When we encounter something sad, the first reflex is to resist. We resist feeling helpless. We flounder. We feel trapped. We rush to have some sense of control. Our thoughts anxiously pursue causes, reasons and cures. But that anxious thinking can still just be our attempt to run from the straightforward experience of what we’re going through-or what that person in front of us is going through.

When we manage to stop resisting this compassionate sadness, we experience a gentling and a softening, a willingness to be human and in the human condition. This sadness is more able to respond to the ache of loss and change with love and kindness. This sadness is more able to fall and still get up to continue with the steps of life. This sadness allows me to be loving even while I ache.

“There are no words that will comfort you,” a wise person told a grieving man, “but I will sit here with you. I will be here for you. I will listen to you if you want to talk, and I will be quiet when you want to sit in silence. I am not afraid of your grief.” – Jeanie Miley

Post by Woo Du-An
www.SevenHawks.com
www.AllowingGod.com

Brother David Steindl-Rast, O.S.B. “The Price of Peace.” Excerpted from talk given at Spirit of Peace Conference, Amsterdam, March, 1985. Reprinted at gratefulness.org.

Jeanie Miley. Sitting Strong: Wresting with an Ornery God. (Macon, Georgia: Smyth & Helwys Publishing, 2006), 65.

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I recognized Basel immediately when the shot cut to a group of refugees standing in the rain, and he turned to look briefly at the camera. I was at home a couple of months back watching a Sky News report showing Syrian refugees wading through muddy water and being pushed by Croatian border police, an embarrassing image of Europe’s refugee policy. It was chilling to recognize a person in such a tragic scene.

Basel had owned a bakery in the heart of Old Damascus, and he rarely charged me for my morning maamouls in another life, when I was an Arabic student in Syria. We’d chat through my very limited vocabulary while I waited for orange juice from the next stall. Now here he was on Sky News, standing in mud in what was once my country.

In Bosnia, we’ve been reliving our nightmare watching the Syrian war unfold. We’ve noted many similarities: mass displacement, loss, U.N. shortcomings, a recalcitrance to take refugees, a Russia-backed tyrant, a quiet international community. For me, following the recent crisis has been profoundly personal. Not only because I found a second home living in Damascus, but because what’s happening to the Syrian refugees is so disturbingly familiar.

We recently observed the 20th anniversary of the Dayton Accords. The agreement may have ended the Bosnian War, but it left us in a political limbo. Bosnia inherited a messy power-sharing agreement that institutionalized ethnic divisions and a countryside sown with signs reading, “Warning! Mines!” It is all a relentless reminder of our past, and a foreshadowing of Syria’s future.

In early spring of 1992, war crept quickly into our delightfully ordinary lives in Sarajevo. I first noticed that fewer and fewer of my classmates were coming to school. One day the teacher separated the few of us left by ethnicity: Bosniak and Croat kids were shoved to the back, and Serbs were to sit up front. I didn’t know where to sit. That was the last day I went to school. The shootings came closer every night in our suburban neighborhood, and we started sleeping in the bathroom, away from the windows. One shooting even happened in our building. It took days to wash all the blood off the walls and stairwell.

I remember some months into the violence when a parade of pristine white vehicles with their blue-helmeted passengers drove into Sarajevo. They honked, and we cheered in relief. My father knelt down so he was at my eye level, and pointed at them. “Look, Dragana,” he said to me, “That’s the United Nations. They’re here to stop the shootings. We’re safe now.”

On a particularly warm spring day, soon after the U.N. convoy arrived, I snuck out onto our balcony to play with my neighbor Zinka. I don’t know which she heard first, the shots or the glass shattering behind us, but she screamed “Sniper!” and sprinted across the long balcony back into the apartment. Instead of following, I froze. Even as everyone inside shouted at me to get up and run into the house, I couldn’t move. I was petrified. My father finally ran out and grabbed me.

Once we were inside, he shook me and yelled at me for going out. Others reasoned with him that I was in shock, and so was he. When you’re living under siege, it’s easy to forget that war is abnormal. People dying in barrel bomb attacks, and children washing up ashore are abnormal. Shooting at six-year-old girls is abnormal.

Not long after the balcony shooting, my mother, brother, and I escaped the siege. My parents put together all the money we had for the three of us to be smuggled out of Sarajevo on a cargo plane. My father stayed behind. I clung to him tightly at the airport and sobbed so hard that my whole face was wet. They lied to me, and to each other, that we would only be gone for a few weeks, just until the U.N. stopped the fighting.

We hung tightly onto each other as the cargo plane took off. We slid and screamed, and there was a loud explosion behind us once we were in the air. It was my first time on a plane, and I cried the whole time; everyone cried. Once we landed, we saw that the plane had been hit in the tail section by Serb forces during takeoff, and realized how close we had come to dying.

When our cargo plane landed, it was at a military base outside of Belgrade, much to my mother’s horror. No one knew where to go. A uniformed officer came out and walked sharply towards us carrying something in his hand, and a gun was visible in his holster. My mother held her breath and squeezed my hand tightly. My family is mixed – my father Bosnian Serb and my mother Bosnian Muslim. My name is a common name in Serbia, but my brother’s isn’t. We were too young to understand the significance of this.

“You just flew in from Sarajevo, didn’t you? I was informed a cargo plane was rerouted here,” he said in a way that made it sound like we were on holiday. He left out the part where his army nearly shot us down from the sky.

There is simply no way of lying when one is carrying two small children in pajamas, and a plastic bag full of documents, passports, diapers, and underwear. We could have passed for a homeless family if it weren’t for mom’s manicure and Ferragamos. Life, after all, was still somewhat normal until that afternoon, when we became refugees.

“Yes,” my mother responded hesitantly.

The Serbian officer knelt down next to my brother and studied us. Which child would he talk to, and ask for our name? If we said too much, even if my brother just said his name or my mom’s name, we could be detained or attacked on the spot.

“I’m Dragana,” I volunteered, before he even asked. My mother audibly sighed and squeezed my hand twice in appreciation, a code not discussed but understood. The officer pinched my cheek and gave me the box of sweets he was carrying before walking away.

Like Basel from Damascus, even after fleeing the terror of war, we still were not safe. I remember the danger we faced as I see scenes of refugees like Basel desperately making their way across Europe. We had to deal with the legions of those eager to take advantage of our vulnerability – the smugglers, the criminals, the traffickers, and the violent xenophobes. Countries like Hungary also closed their borders to us, as they are doing now to Syrians. Others humiliated us to deter more refugees from coming. One of my cousins fled to Denmark, where they were denied freedom of movement and kept in a barracks for a year. Another two were held in long quarantine after they arrived in the Czech Republic, as if they might contaminate the population with anguish. Even those who welcomed us did so only to a point. When the refugee population swelled, when we overstayed our welcome, we were blamed for everything from overcrowded schools to currency inflation.

At some point, a refugee must make a definitive choice regarding their identity. Some adopt an Anglicized nickname, a new persona, a new history to be proud of, a new flag to pledge allegiance to, a new city to love. Others, like myself, continued to identify as a Sarajevan and a refugee, clinging tightly to memories. I had to remember where I sat in my classroom, the name of the boy I liked, the lady at the newspaper stand downstairs. If I forgot, that meant giving up hope that we would go back one day. I would have given anything on this earth to wake up at home in Sarajevo on a dull day, watch my parents rush around getting ready for work, and run downstairs to get the paper and a pack of Walter Wolf cigarettes for my mother. Just one more time.

The most important part of being a refugee is being a good loser; it’s the only way to survive this. You learn to lose your nationality, your home to strangers with bigger guns, your father to mental illness, one aunt to genocide, and another to nationalism and ignorance. You learn to lose your kids, friends, dreams, neighbors, loves, diplomas, careers, photo albums, home movies, schools, museums, histories, landmarks, limbs, teeth, eyesight, sense of safety, sanity, and your sense of belonging in the world.

Basel, and all Syrian refugees, must master living with whatever is left of a person after everything is stripped away. Once he arrives where he’s going and sets his bags down, that’s when Basel will have to process everything, when he will count everything he’s had to leave behind. He will reflect on the past four years and wonder how the world watched and did nothing.

In 2014, I went back to Damascus as part of a UNICEF mission. Crossing the Lebanese border into Syria, in a sea of women carrying children and bags of clothes, I saw my mother everywhere. It was profoundly disturbing to put on a blue helmet every day before going out, and I struggled greatly to reconcile my U.N., refugee and survivor identities.

One morning in April 2014, I put on that blue helmet to tour the schools with a colleague in Damascus. We were about 30 meters from the school entrance when the mortar hit in front of us, and I fell to the ground. A guard shouted at me to get up and run inside before the next one hit, but I was too scared to move. That’s when I remembered Zinka and the balcony shooting. There is a low, soft whistle that is heard before a mortar hits very close. It happens just a fraction of a second before it hits, and somewhere deep inside, I had buried that sound and that memory.

The most difficult part of my journey as a refugee is the coming to terms with the fact that I can’t prevent this from happening to someone else. In Damascus, I often found myself telling displaced children whom I worked with that “schools and houses can be rebuilt when the war is over.” Perhaps I should have said something more pragmatic, told them they would never go home again, at least not to the place where they left their toys and friends, where they felt safe and loved. But instead, I said things like, “You’ll go back home when the war is over.” It’s obvious now that I not only lied to them, but also to myself. I only stopped identifying as a refugee when I stopped fighting, and I acknowledged that nothing will ever put my family and my life back together the way it was.

Despite these dark recollections, it’s generally not war that refugees choose to remember, but the people who help you. My mother’s colleague who snuck us out of Serbia, French volunteers who took refugee kids camping, and those who came to welcome us at the airport when we were resettled in Ohio; those are the people I think of daily. I hope Basel finds such people on his path too.

This story was originally published by Zócalo Public Square. Dragana Kaurin is a human rights researcher and ethnographer. She writes about historical memory, forced displacement, and refugee rights. A graduate of Columbia University, she now lives in New York.

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Recently Thinx, a company who puts “period-proof underwear” out in the world, launched a new ad campaign in NYC’s Union Square subway station. Walls and poles are now adorned with a diverse mix of models, some sitting, some curling up in a ball, some seemingly floating off the floor, all sporting somewhat utilitarian black underwear. The entire campaign eschews the expected imagery of menstrual advertising – there is not a single pair of white pants, or any blue liquid to be seen. There are no fields of flowers, no beaches, no pools, no water. No girls looking concerning or worried. No products peeking out of pockets or falling out of handbags, much to the dismay of their owners. Instead copy matter-of-factly mentions things like cramps and sheet staining and not wanting to leave the house.

Rather ground-breaking from a message standpoint. These images are devoid of shame, of fear, of embarrassment, of judgment – femcare’s go to emotions when selling products. They’re also remarkably devoid of menstruation at all and I suppose that’s the point. If you wear this underwear when you have your period, you’re set. You don’t need to panic if you’re caught unaware, you don’t have to buy disposable products, you don’t need to quietly unwrap tampons in a bathroom, or worry about how to dispose of used pads. It’s almost the other end of the menstrual message spectrum that society’s been both hawking and absorbing for the close to 100 years products have been on sale. While not quite to the point of menstrual suppression drugs, having your period without seeming to have your period is a powerful selling point that seems to be working as both a selling tool and a way to get media attention.

Even more than this turning menstrual advertising inside out though, is the trans man featuring in some of the images.

And that is nothing short of revolutionary.

A first glance, you see a bearded man in boy shorts, sporting tattoos and scars. It takes a moment to put the pieces together. Thinx. Period protection. Menstruation. Bleeding. But it’s a man lying there wearing the product. And when you look closer the scars are where his breasts would have been.

With that one image, concepts and realities rarely spoken about publicly smack you hard in the face. Right now transgender issues and rights are front and center in the public debate. The Obama administration’s recent directive about allowing transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms of the gender they identify with has set off an often antagonistic battle across the country. People are taking sides and making judgments about a subject most hadn’t really thought much about before.

But menstruation and the trans community? With one ad campaign Thinx opened up a public dialog about two taboo subjects and the intersection they share.

It won’t be comfortable. Or easy. As one woman walked past the ad yesterday she muttered, “that’s disgusting,” loud enough for people close by to hear. Menstruation is one of the most secretive subjects there is. And menstruating men? In a time and place when society is becoming more and more polarized, when it’s far too easy and acceptable to publicly hate and shame, when almost nothing is sacred anymore, this discussion can get ugly.

One can hope though people will make connections they hadn’t made before. How it feels to challenge gender norms and still exist in this society. How scary and brave it is to stand up for who you are when you’re different.

Perhaps the reality of thinking about bodies and periods will connect dots and some will imagine what if it was their child or neighbor or friend facing situations they’d never thought about. What it must be like to grapple with periods and basic bodily functions while worrying about something so elemental as using a bathroom.

Maybe, just maybe, it’ll make conversation possible where there hadn’t been any. And perhaps a little more kindness, compassion, and tolerance will find some space in the way we treat each other.

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Violence erupted between police officers and protesters in Paris on Wednesday.

A national police union was demonstrating against “anti-cop hatred” and “the feeling of distrust” that some citizens show toward law enforcement when a group of protestors set a police car ablaze and bashed the car’s windows while two officers were inside. 

According to CBS News, Paris police chief Michel Cadot said a group of roughly 15 protesters hurled a Molotov cocktail at the car, which burst into flames. A male police officer was attacked as he emerged from the car and then was taken to the hospital. His female partner sustained slight injuries. The incident is currently being investigated as attempted homicide. 

Multiple clashes have occurred between labor reform protesters and police across the city in demonstrations against a controversial bill that could give employers the chance to change the 35-hour work week and would make it easier to hire and fire employees. President François Holland said he plans to push forward with the plan despite the protests. 

Learn more about the story in the video above. 

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