Dear Oakland: An Imperfect Love Letter – September 2022 by Erin Poppler

It’s a losing proposition, he told me. What? I asked. Oakland.

The fish are all dead in the Lake. Willie, the Ambassador of the Lake, died and left only a bench adorned with flowers. There have been 6 shootings in 3 days. Children died. The A’s are rumored to be leaving, taking a cue from the Raiders and Warriors, who left town too. The stadium is overrun by bats, feral cats and lewd acts. 

Why do you stay?

What you read, what is rumored, what becomes a cautionary tale, is not Oakland’s story. 

Violence does not always beget violence. A shooting in broad daylight at the Lake. I saw it. The police blanketed the park with guns drawn. Tonight, the same park reclaimed for a community play lit up by applause and cheers; the audience seated on blankets. 

Just blocks away, the museum is remodeled. And Friday nights, welcomes Everyone to celebrate music and art (for free!).

Yes, Willie is gone. The everyday acknowledgments and acts of kindness that swelled around him are the indomitable spirit that survives and honors him.

The fish are dead, and bat rays too. It’s true. The algae did it, the scientists say. As locals stand on the lakeshore and pull out fish, they warn those inclined to eat them, it might not be safe. Be careful. Because it is Oakland, that is whispered often: Be Careful.

Those A’s, despite all odds and unfair comparisons, keep the bats swinging (the wooden, not winged ones) and heads held high while they remain rooted in Oakland.  

I stay because of pride in my roots, extending over 20 years. Because loving a city is an imperfect proposition. Because the secret of Oakland is in plain sight even though it never makes headlines: Resilience.

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Excerpt from Oremus (let us pray) by Pádraig Ó Tuama

Prayer, like poetry, like breath, like our own names, has a fundamental rhythm in our bodies. It changes, it adapts, it varies from the canon. It sings, it swears, it is syncopated by the rhythm underneath the rhythm, the love underneath the love, the rhyme underneath the rhyme, the name underneath the name, the welcome underneath the welcome, the prayer beneath the prayer. So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars. Let us listen to the sound of breath in our bodies. Let us listen to the sounds of our own voices, of our own names, of our own fears. Let us name the harsh light and soft darkness that surround us. Let’s claw ourselves out from the graves we’ve dug. Let’s lick the earth from our fingers. Let us look up and out and around. The world is big and wide and wild and wonderful and wicked, and our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable, and full of meaning. Oremus. Let us pray.

Excerpt from the Waves by Virginia Woolf

Thus I visited each of my friends in turn, trying, with fumbling fingers, to prise open their locked caskets. I went from one to the other holding my sorrow—no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life—for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken…

Essay by Jeannette Encinias

Listening is an act of love. An art form. A skill that you can cultivate and practice.

Listening is a gift of silence, of learning, of putting to bed your hungry words so that you can scoop up the voice of another person and hold it in the space between your life and theirs.

What an intimacy this can be. Your ears astute, a person’s story heard, a thread to bind you in a window of time.

Have you felt that before? I have. It’s divine.

Our world is noisy. It’s getting noisier by the day. Peace and quiet often seem out of reach. People feel unheard, left out, alone. The shouting is getting louder. The fences are growing taller. We have created a world where only the voices we are comfortable hearing can be heard and we grow narrow by this apathy. We dismiss each other. We turn our backs. We create an echo chamber that cages us all.

Listening well is a way to untether yourself from this madness. A way to move toward love and a more expansive understanding. A way to grow up and grow wise.

Listening is not passive. It requires your breath and your presence. You must call on your patience and your strength. Listening asks more from you than talking ever will.

Talking is easy and we know it.

But can you be curious and open without shutting the doors of your mind too quickly? Can you sense the fear that lives inside of us all? The love and the longing as well? Can you breathe into the beating heart and expanding lungs? Can you remember that we all have blood and bones and one day none of that at all?

Can you skip a beat? Can you skip two?

There are times to make your voice heard. There are years when your story must be told and when your silence is not a gift. Shout it then. Write it. Paint it. Sing it. Let no one and nothing stop you. And then there are times to prop up those ears and lift your chin. Offer up your beautiful attention.

Just listen.

As we move into the rest of this truly breathtaking year and into the rest of our lives, can you study the art of listening? Can you shake up the talking vs. listening ratio? Can you let this listening strengthen you and not get the best of you? Can you become more than you ever were before?

These are questions I ask myself and so here I offer them to you.

Excerpt from The Strangeness of Grief by V.S. Naipaul

We are never finished with grief. It is part of the fabric of living. It is always waiting to happen. Love makes memories and life precious; the grief that comes to us is proportionate to that love and is inescapable.

Excerpt from a Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…

Excerpt from Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman

Nature has cunning ways of finding our weakest spot. Just remember: I am here. Right now you may not want to feel anything. Perhaps you never wished to feel anything. And perhaps it’s not with me that you’ll want to speak about these things. But feel something you did.

You had a beautiful friendship. Maybe more than a friendship. And I envy you. In my place, most parents would hope the whole thing goes away, or pray that their sons land on their feet soon enough. But I am not such a parent. In your place, if there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, don’t snuff it out, don’t be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than we’d want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of 30 and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything—what a waste!

Then let me say one more thing. It will clear the air. I may have come close, but I never had what you two had. Something always held me back or stood in the way. How you live your life is your business. Remember our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. And before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one looks at it, much less wants to come near it. Right now there’s sorrow. Pain. Don’t kill it and with it the joy you’ve felt.

Lyrics from ‘Walls’ by Tom Petty

All around your island
There’s a barricade
It keeps out the danger
Holds in the pain

Sometimes you’re happy
And sometimes you cry
Half of me is ocean
Half of me is sky

But you got a heart so big
It could crush this town
And I can’t hold out forever
Even walls fall down

And some things are over
Some things go on
Part of me you carry
And part of me is gone

Excerpt from The Opinions Of A New Yorker by CGS

New York is noisy.
New York is overcrowded.
New York is ugly.
New York is unhealthy.
New York is outrageously expensive.
New York is bitterly cold in winter.
New York is steaming hot in summer.
I wouldn’t live outside New York for anything in the world.

Lyrics from ‘Anthem’ by Leonard Cohen

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.