"Hope is the thing with feathers…”

Hope is the thing with feathers . . .

-          Emily Dickinson

I awoke this morning to bird song, and for a moment I was lifted beyond the despair that has caught me in its grip -- despair for the country, for the earth, for loved ones whose lives are increasingly tossed into the chaos, for the future.  The disappearance of persons into labyrinths of prisons in this country, Guantanamo, and the tortuous CECOT prison complex in El Salvador has broken what was left of my spirit. Then this morning I heard a report that the State Department has changed what it considers to be human rights abuses in order to align with recent Executive Orders, deleting critiques of such practices as retaining political prisoners without due process of law, restrictions on free and fair elections, violence against LGBTQ persons, threats against people with disabilities, restrictions on political participation, coercive medical or psychological practices, and extensive gender-based violence. Ostensibly these changes are to lift restrictions on sanctions toward other countries, but I fear they portend clearing the way for such abuses in the US as well. 

My heart is heavy in ways I have not previously known, so I am grateful for that brief moment of delight in the early morning.  Later in the day, I found myself wondering whether those who suffered and died in concentration camps, whose despair certainly was beyond comparison with my own, found any solace in the sight and sound of birds who flew freely over the walls of the camps in ways they could not. The daughter of survivors of Auschwitz, Toby Saltzman, recalled that her mother, who often suffered bouts of despair over the Holocaust, found her spirits lifted by the songs of birds. When Toby later visited Auschwitz she was greeted by flocks of birds.  Upon her return, she reflected, “I left Auschwitz feeling a surge of triumph that my parents survived, and gratitude to the birds that gave my mother spiritual sustenance and hope.” We are sorely in need of such sustenance in these times.

My sister found such sustenance in birds all of her life.  Her back yard was a veritable feeding station, with feeders of every shape and size, suet feeders, and a heated bird bath. A first grade teacher, she passed on her love of birds to her young students, teaching them all about the lives, habits, and songs of a different bird each month. She found her greatest peace and solace sitting looking out the window at the colorful array of birds at her feeders – cardinals, blue jays, goldfinches, rose-breasted grosbeaks, purple finches, redpolls, and of course any number of chickadees, juncos, and sparrows.  Even when she entered memory care in the last months of her life, her sons made certain she had a bird feeder placed outside her window. On my last day with her, we spent a few moments on that sunny morning in the outside courtyard where she lifted her usually downcast head and brightened with the sight of birds at the feeder. For this last gift of the birds to her, I am most grateful.

My two-year-old grandson has inherited his great aunt’s enchantment with birds.  He was only 20 months when he first heard the song of a chickadee and quickly repeated it with such delight  -- “chick-a-dee-dee-dee.”  As the birds have slowly migrated north, he’s learned the names of the pine siskins, redpolls, nuthatches, goldfinches, and juncos now at the feeder. And he’s always recognized the cawing of crows. Then one day this winter he looked out the window and said, “bird – scary.”  I couldn’t make sense of this sudden fear of birds in which he has so delighted, until I followed his gaze up into a far tree and saw the large pileated woodpecker.  With its size and long, sharp beak hammering away at the tree trunk, I can see why he was scared.  It is remarkably similar to prehistoric pteradactyls!  But in flight, with their enormous wingspan, they are such impressive birds and never cease to inspire awe in me.

I will need to take down the bird feeder soon now that the bears are awake and about.  I’ve let it stay out a bit longer than usual this year since my grandson loves the birds so, and watching their flitting about the feeder can always give me a moment’s respite from the cares of the world. I’m eager to introduce my grandson to more of the birds in the woods and waters as they return this spring and summer – the song sparrows and red-winged blackbirds, the robins, peewees, and blue jays, the seagulls, sandpipers, mallards, and loons.  Such marvels we have ahead of us.

I am grateful for these antidotes to despair.  As Wendell Berry is so often quoted as saying, “When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, . . . I come into the peace of wild things, who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.” Philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore adds, “Let me live like a bird in this way too: Not forever, but just for a while, let me perch on my front step and attend to the world around me, rather than the vision ahead.”[i]

Attend to the world around me.  It is afternoon now and the birds are still singing in the woods outside my window.  It is as if they want to remind me of all that is still good and glorious in the world. Attend to that.

Many years ago, I gave my sister a plaque fashioned by a local artist friend with words of Terry Tempest Williams that so spoke to who my sister was – words of wisdom and solace for these times. So I pass them along, with gratitude for the gifts of the spirit so freely and generously shared by these feathered ones:

“I pray to the birds. I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day – the invocations and benedictions of Earth. I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear.”[ii]

 

Postscript: In the evening after I wrote this, I found a baby pileated woodpecker sucking on the sap dripping down the maple that we’d tapped earlier. It has been enchanting and delighting me, drawn to its sweetness just as it is drawn to the sweetness of the sap. I suspect my grandson, were he here, would not find this pileated to be so scary. :)

Sources

Butterflies, Birds, and the Poetry of Freedom | Reform Judaism

Moore, Kathleen Dean. Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World. Berkely: Counterpoint, 2021.

The State Department is changing its mind about human rights : NPR

Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. New York: Vintage, 1992.

[i] Moore, 123.

[ii] Williams, 149.

There Is No Time Not To Love

There are those who are trying to set fire to the world,
We are in danger.
There is time only to work slowly,
There is no time not to love.[1]

-Deena Metzger

 

My life feels divided at the moment between those days when the latest destruction of vital and important work, rights, the health of the planet demands urgent attention and those when a little hand slipped in mine and a voice still learning to form words require a no less urgent attention, but of a different kind.

The first tightens my chest, quickens my pulse, fuels both my sense of indignation and my fears. It sends me into rabbit holes of news sources, searching in a curious but perhaps morbid way for what else has gone wrong since last I ventured into news of the current state of the world.  It sets my fingers typing furious emails to Congressional representatives and calling Congressional offices. It propels me to attend online organizing calls for action and protests on the streets. It all feels fast and furious -- that we must act quickly before there is nothing left to save.

The second releases my breath, calms my nervous system.  It requires a slower pace – life at the speed of a long hike being a walk around the woodpile. In this time matrix we take long lunches – why eat spaghettios by the spoonful when each little ring is just the right size to place on a finger and eat one at a time?; stop whatever we are doing to marvel at all the pine siskins at the feeder and research a new never-before-seen bird who has joined them – a red-breasted nuthatch – who knew such a glorious bird existed?; and respond patiently to the hopeful “read again?” with a second, third, fourth repetition of the beloved bedtime story. When the world would turn my gaze outward, it is as if this little one would take my head in his hands, turn it toward his sweet face, and say “here, now,” demanding nothing but pure presence.

Sara Ruddick describes the giving of “attentive love” as one of the main tasks of maternal – and by extension, grandmaternal – care.[2].  Ruddick took her concept of attentive love from Iris Murdoch, who drew her inspiration from Simone Weil. Weil defined love as “intense, pure, disinterested, gratuitous, generous attention.”[3]  I used to read those words slowly to my students, asking that they take in fully what each would require.  “Intense” – from the Latin intensus – meaning “with extreme force, strength, degree, amount”; “pure” – from the Latin purus – meaning “clean, unmixed, free from dirt, unadulterated”; “disinterested” – from the Old French – desinteresse – meaning “free from personal or self-interested bias”; “gratuitous” – from the Latin gratuitus – meaning “done without pay or favor”; and generous – from the Latin generosus – meaning “to be of noble birth, excellence, magnanimity.”  Such love comes from a place of complete goodwill, unmixed with any sense of gain for self.  It is noble, magnanimous, and strong.  In truth, the world requires no less of us.  As frenetic as the overwhelm of events and the demands of resistance may cause us to feel, this – intense, pure, disinterested, gratuitous, generous attention to each other, the needs of humanity, and the earth – and the unhurried tempo they require, may well be what we most need to repair the world.

“I believe that our world is on the verge of self-destruction and death,” wrote feminist theologian Beverly Wildung Harrison, “because the society as a whole has so deeply neglected that which is most human and most basic of all the works of love – the work of human communication, of caring and nurturance, of tending the personal bonds of community.”[4] “To tend” is to give one’s attention to. “Tend,” “attention” -- from the same Latin root -- tendere – meaning “to stretch, extend.”  The image is of extending one’s neck to see and hear more closely; of extending one’s arm to reach out, to offer, to hold; of extending one’s heart, one’s compassion, both to distant others and ones closest at hand.

I’ve always loved what I thought to be the relation between the verb “to tend” and the adjective “tender,” for they seem so closely connected to me. To be tender, to act with tenderness, is synonymous with loving and caring, as is the giving of attention. Yet surprisingly, “tend” and “tender” do not derive from the same Latin root, with that of “tender” and “tenderness” being not tendere, but rather tener, meaning “soft, delicate, of a young age.” It is in this sense that Audre Lorde advised that “we have to consciously study how to be tender with each other” in recognition that we each have within us that “brave bruised girlchild” who needs our encouragement and gentle care.[5] We need both the outreach of tending and the gentle care toward those parts of us that are most tender. In tending, in giving our attention, we must receive and respond to the other tenderly. And before we are even able to attend to someone we must first know what it is to be regarded with tenderness.  As Lorde wrote, we must “know we are worthy of touch before we can reach out for each other.”[6] To imbue someone with that sense of worth is perhaps the most important and radical work we can do in this moment. As author Jason Reynolds said in a recent interview, “I do believe that tenderness is the most radical form of expression”[7] -- radical in requiring equal amounts vulnerability and strength; radical in how it could, in Lorde’s words, “keep this world revolving toward some livable future.”[8] How much more radical are expressions of tenderness in the current state of society in which toughness, cruelty, contempt, derision, and hate, especially toward the most tender among us, are far too often the forms of expression of those who feign to be our leaders.

“There is time only to work slowly.”  I’ve pondered that line, why Metzger counsels us to take the time to work slowly on these issues that seem to demand a rapid response team.  Perhaps it is that we need to respond with more thought and consideration than a panicked reaction would permit.  But perhaps it is the recognition that any action – in order to be “good trouble,” to be responsive in a way that attends to real needs -- requires investing in growing and tending relationship, and that takes time. Many have been doing that work of tending relationship for years, decades, and the success of today’s resistance efforts is strengthened by the work that has come before.  That work is also happening in the process of doing resistance work.  In conversations at meetings and protests, I hear not only the dismay over the Trump administration actions and strategies to combat that, but also people inquiring about each other’s work and health and family and dogs and lives.  The tending of relationship, the work of loving attention is the most important work we have to do and to overlook that in our hurry is to run roughshod over the very thing we most need.

. . . . .

As physically exhausting as a day with a two-year-old can be, these days are a reprieve from the speed and stress of the outside world burning down before our eyes. I imagine they are my salvation of sorts, reminding me to slow down, appreciate the wonders of the natural world, take time to be here now, and remember, in Metzger’s words, that “there is no time not to love.”  

Sources

Jason Reynolds' 'Twenty-Four Seconds from Now' is a teen love story for all ages : NPR's Book of the Day : NPR

Harrison, Beverly Wildung. 1989. “The Power of Anger in the Work of Love.” In Judith Plaskow and Carol Christ, Eds. Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality.  San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 214-225.

Lorde, Audre. “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1984. 145-175.

Metzger, Deena. “Song.” In Looking for the Faces of God. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1989.

Ruddick, Sara. Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace. New York: Ballantine, 1989.

Weil, Simone. The Simone Weil Reader. Ed. George A. Panichas. New York: David McKay, 1977.

 





[1] Metzger, “Song.” Thanks to Pat Bennett for bringing this poem to my attention.

[2] Ruddick, 119-123.

[3] Weil, 333.

[4] Harrison, 217.

[5] Lorde, 175.

[6] Ibid., 174-175.

[7] Jason Reynolds' 'Twenty-Four Seconds from Now' is a teen love story for all ages : NPR's Book of the Day : NPR

[8] Lorde, 175.

Uprising!

“ . . . the uprising of [our] nature is but the effort to give to [our] whole being the opportunity to expand into all [our] essential nobility.” – Sarah Grimké— [i]

It wasn’t the first time I had stood in protest on that street corner.  I’m sure it won’t be the last. But the gathered crowd was by far the largest I’d been a part of there, covering not just the plaza on the western corner of Lake Avenue and Superior Street, but all the other corners, as well as up and down the sidewalks for half a block.  We were a motley crew, from young people perhaps at their first protest to the many well-seasoned grey-haired. Though I met a few indigenous friends there, I was struck by the overwhelming perceived whiteness of the crowd.  I imagine Black and Brown people would be more reluctant to join a street protest where they might be targeted. Indeed, on my way home I heard a report that the number of “driving while Black and Brown” traffic stops has increased in recent days.

Standing in the wet snow, chanting, “This is what democracy looks like!” and “What do we want? Democracy! When do we want it? Now!,” the atmosphere was more of a party than of a wake.[ii] Yet, when the chants began, I found myself near tears, wanting to sob rather than shout.  As some report seeing their lives flash before their eyes when facing imminent death, I saw my protest life flashing before my eyes – all the anti-war marches – from Vietnam to Iraq to the recent Israeli attacks on Gaza, the marches for the ERA, the Take Back the Night marches, the MMIW marches, the Standing Rock and Line 3 protests, the Women’s Marches, the march for science, the vigils after school shootings and nightclub shootings and the murder of George Floyd, the rallies to protect trans rights,  . . . the list goes on and on. And I felt like weeping, for all these efforts to bring peace and justice and equality to this land were being trampled on and were under threat of being destroyed. What had it all been for?

It was good to be with friends – some made along the way — a spontaneous mutual aid network as we collectively tried to figure out the new parking system and thankfully found a young person who helped us with the technology skills which we then passed along; and others I’d known for years – friends from my work at the university, from church, from indigenous trauma training, from the early years of feminist organizing in this city, from standing together on this street corner countless times. It added to the general feeling of solidarity and good will. We were in this together.

It also gave us a chance to catch up on each other’s lives, as well as to learn of the ways the Trump administration’s actions were impacting their work.  I learned that, in light of Trump’s threat to stop federal funding of universities that allowed protests on campus, the university had issued a reminder that protests on campus of greater than 100 people (and 50 on the smaller branch campuses) is against university policy.  From a friend working for one of the indigenous bands I learned that much of their funding is under threat.  On the flip side, from another I learned that at least one of the local hospitals is prepared to protect the rights and privacy of patients should ICE agents arrive. I also heard about other resistance organizations popping up in Duluth and the surrounding area and of how 160 people had shown up at an Indivisible meeting in a neighboring small town that generally votes more conservative than other cities and towns.

As I write this, I’m very aware of how I’m deliberately being vague about the identities of those with whom I spoke, unsure of how they might be targeted or suffer consequences from their workplaces.  As one friend asked, “Is it okay if we take photos?”  I had wondered the same thing. We were both concerned for the safety of protestors from federal agents and arrest – for citizens exercising their First Amendment right of assembly.

Just a few nights before, at a Twin Cities Indivisible zoom meeting, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison had predicted that with Kash Patel heading up the FBI, people would begin being arrested – whether journalists criticizing the administration’s actions or officials not abiding by Executive Orders or ordinary citizens.  The group of us gathered on the street corner deliberated on what grounds we could be arrested. “For loitering on the street?,” asked one sarcastically. “For disturbing the ‘peace’?” I mused.

I’m left pondering the state of the country — of our drift, or perhaps leap, towards authoritarianism – where rights I have always considered unassailable — of speech, the press, and assembly — are no longer guaranteed.  In all my criticisms of the government, I’ve at least been grateful for these – grateful not to be living under conditions of oppression and suppression like those in Russia, Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan.  But here we are, on the verge. I fear for our country.  I fear for the life of my child and his children, for their freedoms, for the future of their education – or will it be indoctrination, for their health, for the sustainability of the planet. 

I cannot dwell in this darkness for long stretches at a time, so I go looking for instances of hope, paradigms of possibility. I found them in Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell – her examination of communities that arise out of disaster.  For what is happening in this country is indeed a disaster of global proportions into the foreseeable future.  What Solnit found in her study of communities affected by disasters is that “the prevalent human nature in disaster is resilient, resourceful, generous, empathic, and brave.”[iii]  This is what I felt standing on that street corner – surrounded by good and generous and courageous people, all rising to demand the best of what we could be.  I must trust in this resilient resistance and resolve to carry us and break through these dark days.

Sources

Civic Responsibilities at the University of Minnesota | University of Minnesota System

Grimké, Sarah. “Sisters of Charity.” In Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and Other Essays. Ed. Elizabeth Ann Bartlett. 156-164. New Haven: Yale U Press, 1988.

Solnit, Rebecca. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. New York: Penguin Books. 2009, 2020.

[i] A paraphrase of Sarah Grimké’s “Sisters of Charity.” “Our” has been substituted for “her.” Grimké, 163.

[ii] The protest was organized by 50501 – Fifty Protests, Fifty States, One Movement – a recently formed response protesting the anti-democratic and illegal actions of the Trump administration.

[iii] Solnit, 6.

Silenced

In the past few weeks, I’ve been feeling as silenced as if a gag order had been issued on all commentary on the Trump administration’s reckless and dangerous actions in the past month.  I’ve begun posts in my mind on “Fascism 101” and “The Myth of Meritocracy” and “Trump: The New Caligula” but have not been able to put pen to paper.  As much as I’ve tried to buffer myself from the trauma of the news cycle, I’ve also felt a certain obligation to remain aware of the various attacks being made on federal agencies and international diplomacy.  As much as I’ve wanted to remain insulated, I’ve not wanted to become insular.  Yet each new horror has left me increasingly speechless.  There are no words.  And yet it is precisely voices of opposition that are most needed right now. 

So many who fear for their jobs and for their very lives are afraid to speak out right now.  I’m thinking particularly of the federal workers who have had to follow silently along in order not to lose their positions, of the teachers and professors in the 23 states who have to abide by their state censorship of certain curricula -- mostly regarding what they are permitted to teach about race and gender in their educational institutions, of the physicians who would risk incarceration if they were to provide the needed procedures for pregnant women in their care.[i] 

But I have no such threats on my livelihood and position keeping me silent.  The advantage of being retired is that I can speak without fear of retribution by my employer. Nor, as Lorde suggested, has the fear of visibility or “the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment, of pain, of death”[ii] kept me from writing. So why my puzzling silence? 

In part, I haven’t been able to form my thoughts coherently enough to write.  Perhaps that is part of the intent of the overwhelm – to render us speechless.  I know enough about trauma to know that one of its effects is to shut down the speech centers in our brain.  I have not wanted to succumb to the overwhelm, but it has happened nonetheless.  I feel this vague shroud muffling every attempt to be articulate. The combination of not wanting to add to the doom and gloom, the sheer volume of actions begging for response, and a certain paralysis that invades my being on the worst days have all contributed. I’m sure, as well, that I’m suffering from the loss a few months ago of my dear friend who was my most steadfast reader and respondent and whose questions, comments, and insights provoked, inspired, and urged me on.

My silence has not been total. I have spoken out to my friends and family, and to my Congressperson and Senators, but I’m either preaching to the choir or, in the case of my Republican Congressperson, speaking to a brick wall.

In the past three years, when immunosuppression has left me fairly isolated, writing this blog has been such an important avenue of connection and community, , and we certainly need community now more than ever.  It has been a valued outlet to me for sharing those things that I’ve learned or observed or witnessed that beg to be shared, and for what George Orwell has called “aesthetic enthusiasm” – “perception of beauty in the external world, or on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement.  Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another . . . .“ [iii] Orwell, who lived in a time of one tyranny after another, [iv]wrote of how he’d had no desire to be solely a “pamphleteer” – writing primarily with political purposes, but found himself thrust into that role given the politics of the time. Nor had I wanted to focus entirely on political themes in this blog, though that was certainly part of my motivation.  I’ve loved writing about snow, woodland flowers, waterfalls, and murmurations of birds. So much that is beautiful in the world, in human interaction, in wise and carefully crafted words, in the profound and mundane moments of life, want to claim my attention, yet the perpetual pounding of the political prevents their rising to the surface, and the absurdities of the administration obliterate my ability to give them witness. So instead, I’ve not written at all. Yet, increasingly I’m feeling what Audre Lorde’s daughter told her mother – “’ . . . you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out. . . .”[v] 

That’s it.  I’m not feeling like a whole person in this numbing silence.  Perhaps some of you have felt the same.  The truth of the matter is that many of the writings that I have valued most in my life -- whose truths that have shaped my deepest understandings of the political, of justice, of truth, of our capacities both for capitulation and for resistance -- have been by those who continued to write during similar circumstances to those we are facing now– George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus among others. While I don’t pretend to rival their brilliance, I do, like them, feel the imperative of remaining a voice in this political landscape.

As Lorde wrote, “For those of us who write . . . for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.”[vi]

So this is my first attempt to chip away at what feels like a dome of ice over my being, in hopes that it will begin to let the water of words flow.  In this turbulent time, may my writing do justice to the insight of Ta-Nehisi Coates, “. . .that it should do the work of illuminating, of confronting and undoing, the violence  . . .around me, [and ] that beauty must be joined to politics, . . .”[vii] Reminders of the beauty around us may be the key to surviving these times intact. As Camus wrote, “Is it possible eternally to reject injustice without ceasing to acclaim the nature of [humankind] and the beauty of the world? Our answer is yes. . . In upholding beauty, we prepare the way for the day of regeneration when civilization will give first place . . .to this living virtue on which is founded the common dignity of [humankind] and the world [we] live in. . . .” [viii]

Sources

America’s Censored Classrooms 2024 - PEN America

Camus, Albert. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. Trans. Anthony Bower. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. The Message. New York: BCP Literary, Penguin Random House, 2024.

Lorde, Audre. “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1984. 40-44.

Orwell, George. “Why I Write.” In Why I Write.  First published 1946. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. 1-10.

 

[i] While I’ve tried mustering compassion for the hundreds of Republican Senators and Congresspeople who have remained silent out of fear for their positions, power, prestige, and perhaps their lives, I must admit I have primarily contempt, for it is their job and sworn oath to defend the Constitution.  If they did not have the courage to do so, they never should have run for office. My own silent and compliant Republican Congressperson has told me in a form letter that he actually applauds the actions of Trump.  Not only has he remained silent, he has added fuel to the firestorm that is raging in Washington, DC.

[ii] Lorde, 43. 

[iii] Orwell, 5.

[iv] Orwell’s first encounter with tyranny was as a member of the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, then the Spanish Civil War, then the regimes of Hitler and Stalin.

[v] Lorde, 42.

[vi] Lorde, 43.

[vii] Coates, 15.

{viii] Camus, 276-277. Certain words altered to be more inclusive.

Three Women

In the first ten days of the Trump administration, when his sycophants are purring and praising, private corporate execs are rolling over and doing his bidding, and even many of his opponents in Congress have been somewhat muted in their response to his actions, three women – Phyllis Fong, Judge Loren AliKhan, and Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde -- have been audacious in their visible and vocal resistance.

Phyllis Fong

On Friday, January 24th, just four days after taking office, Trump fired seventeen Inspector Generals, the federal watchdogs over government agencies.  Among these was Phyllis Fong, the Inspector General of the US Department of Agriculture.  But Ms. Fong refused the firing, citing the position of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency that these firings “’did not comply with the requirements set out in law and therefore are ineffective at this time.’”[i]  Having served in the USDA for twenty-two years under four presidents, she returned defiantly to her office on Monday morning, only to be escorted out by federal security agents. 

Judge Loren AliKhan

On that same Monday, January 27th, the Trump administration issued a freeze on all federal grants and loans, causing chaos and confusion around the country, and creating a large outcry in response. The freeze was due to take effect at 5 PM on Tuesday, January 28th, but late in the afternoon on Tuesday, just minutes before the freeze was to take effect, in response to a lawsuit filed by four organizations representing nonprofits, public health officials, and small business leaders, US District Judge Loren AliKhan ordered an administrative stay on the freeze. The stay was a pause, with hearings on the matter scheduled for Monday, February 3rd, but the stay gave multiple opponents of the freeze time to rally before the country descended into chaos.  By Wednesday, the Trump administration rescinded the order.

Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde

Finally, on the Tuesday after Trump’s inauguration, the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde lifted her voice and courageously spoke directly to the President, beseeching him to be merciful to those he has slated for persecution, in particular, immigrants, those fleeing war and persecution, and LGBTQ+ individuals.  Trump was quick to condemn her remarks, calling her “nasty” and “a Radical left win Trump-hater.” Other conservatives joined in, with Georgia representative Mike Collins going so far as to say she should be added to the deportation list. All because she spoke truth to power.  As she herself said in her sermon, “. . . we don’t always know where the truth lies, and there is a lot working against the truth now. But when we do know, when we know what is true, it is incumbent upon us to speak the truth, even when, especially when it costs us.” And the cost for these three may be particularly high, given that they are all women, and two are women of color.

In her sermon, Budde called for a unity that allows for diversity of opinions, but is upheld by its commitment to three things: 1) the honor and dignity of every person, 2) honesty, and 3) humility. These are also three of the foundations of Albert Camus’s ethic of rebellion[ii], and in their actions all three of these women exemplify the rebel, in Camus’s sense of the term.” All three said “yes” and “no” simultaneously – “yes” to their own dignity and integrity and “no” to being oppressed and silenced in the face of one who would use his power to do just that. Silence is born of fear or despair; rebellion gives birth to speaking out against injustice and oppression in the affirmation of dignity.

All three also acted out of a rebellious sense of solidarity – whether the metaphysical solidarity of making a claim on behalf of something that surpasses oneself – in the cases of Fong and AliKhan, the law; or on behalf of others similarly situated – in Fong’s case, her colleagues who had also been fired; or as compassionate action on behalf of the oppressed – as was so beautifully articulated in Budde’s sermon.  As Camus stated so succinctly, “I rebel -- therefore we exist.”[iii] Even as individual actions, actsa of rebellion are necessarily in solidarity with the collective.

A final requirement of solidarity is a refusal to oppress in turn.  As Budde said in her sermon, we are all capable of good and bad. Thus, we require a humility that recognizes our own capacity to act unjustly, and then refuses to do so. None of the women attempted to humiliate or degrade Trump in their actions or their speech.  They simply acted on their own truths, out of their own integrity and in honor of their own and others’ dignity.

In sum, Fong, AliKhan, and Budde acted as Budde suggested we all do to build unity -- in affirmation of the dignity of every individual, honestly, and with a humility that refuses to oppress in turn.  They deserve our admiration and respect. In these times when despair lurks around the edges of every news update and hope can be hard to find, I find hope in the rebellious courage of these three women.

As Camus wrote: “Some will say that hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every [one], on the foundation of [their] own sufferings and joys, builds for all.”[iv]

Sources

Bartlett, Elizabeth. Rebellious Feminism: Camus’s Ethic of Rebellion and Feminist Thought. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Camus, Albert. Resistance, Rebellion, and Death.  Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage Books, 1974.

Camus, Albert. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. Trans. Anthony Bower. New York: Vintage Books, 1956.

Federal judge temporarily blocks Trump’s halt of federal grants and loans | Trump administration | The Guardian

mariann edgar budde prayer - YouTube

Trump criticizes ‘nasty’ bishop who made pro-immigrant and LGBTQ+ plea | Donald Trump | The Guardian

USDA inspector general escorted out of office after defying Trump order | Trump administration | The Guardian

Who is Mariann Edgar Budde, the bishop who angered Trump with inaugural sermon? | US news | The Guardian

[i] Email from Phyllis Fong to colleagues, USDA inspector general escorted out of office after defying Trump order | Trump administration | The Guardian

[ii] See my Rebellious Feminism: Camus’s Ethic of Rebellion and Feminist Thought. Budde considered these three elements to be necessary for “unity.” In drawing the comparison to Camus, it is intriguing to me that Camus considered “unity” to be one of the key elements of an ethic of rebellion – clearly stating that such unity is diverse and multivocal, and in distinct contrast with “totality,” which is singular, monovocal, and imposed from without through coercion and propaganda – the kind of “totality” demanded by Trump and eerily present in his loyal followers and those who would collude with him, all of whom seem to speak with one voice.

[iii] Camus, The Rebel, 22

[iv] Camus, Resistance, 272. I altered some of the language to be gender neutral.

The Need for Roots

In those first few days after the holidays, when the togetherness, warmth, and happy times with family and friends came to an abrupt end, a song my son used to sing as a small child kept running through my mind:

Keep Christmas with you all through the year.

When Christmas is over, save some Christmas cheer.

These precious moments, hold them very dear

And keep Christmas with you all through the year.

The simple glee of my 21-month-old grandson finding ways to scoot and slide down the small icy slope in our backyard was enough to keep the grief over the loss of my sister and my recent loss of my dearest friend at bay.  But in the days after their departure, as I spent time with my friend’s family planning her memorial gathering and visited another dear friend who has chosen to enter hospice in her final days of a terminal illness, coupled with the hooded ogre of the approaching Project 2025, saving Christmas cheer has had its challenges.

But my son found a way.  He and his wife decided they didn’t want the precious times to end, and within a week had decided to pull up stakes from their home 150 miles away, found and signed on to buy a house just five minutes from our home so that the precious moments could continue.

In our youth we’re told to cut the apron strings, spread our wings, try out new vistas, seek out new identities and opportunities away from the homes that had defined and too often confined us. In my day, I probably needed that break to find the feminism that was just beginning around the country when I first moved a thousand miles from home to the unknown hinterlands of Minnesota, but I missed the closeness of my parents and brothers’ and sister’s  families and would return to Michigan every summer, and was lucky to forge deep friendships in my newfound community. My son, too, needed to prove himself intellectually and professionally, traveling thousands of miles away in pursuit of an education and a career, and finding his own way in the big city.

 Yet if there’s anything the latest election has told any of us, it is that we need each other more than ever. Tired of the anonymity and isolation of cookie cutter houses, strip malls, and miles upon miles of freeway separating friends, my son chose to come home.  Home to friends and family.  Home to manageable distances. Home to communities where neighbor could rely on neighbor. Home. 

In addition to the nationwide People’s Marches Women’s March is holding on January 18th, in preparation for what may lie ahead in 2025, Women’s March launched its Digital Defenders Project to fight back against disinformation online and has been holding trainings by Project South and Metro Atlanta Mutual Aid Fund to show how mutual aid networks can provide collective care when the system fails, and it seems that governmental systems of care are being poised to be dismantled, and even turn hostile. These organizations are based in Black radical traditions of caring for each other and building parallel infrastructure when the external systems ignore and fail the needs of the people, creating aid organizations that can respond to both man-made and natural disasters. Further, they are not just a defensive reaction in response to difficult times but also seek to enact a liberatory vision of what is possible.  

The concept of mutual aid also has its roots in the anarchism of Peter Kropotkin, a biologist who countered Darwin’s theories of survival of the fittest with the examples of bees and ants and other species whose survival depends on their cooperation with each other – their mutual aid.  He argued that we humans are far more like the bees in that we are social creatures whose thriving depends on our working collectively toward living the good life.

 A biologist like Kropotkin, but focusing on plants rather than animals, Robin Wall Kimmerer arrives at the same conclusions – that our mutual flourishing depends on the “gift economy” of plants, -- where “wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away.” It nurtures community bonds “that enhance mutual well-being,” “organizing ourselves in a way to sustain life  . . .  where the economic unit is ‘we’ rather than ‘I,’ and “all flourishing is mutual.” [i]

 I’m struck by the comparison to the networks of mycorrhizal fungus that support a whole neighborhood of trees – not just species kin, but also those who are unrelated. In her study of these networks, Suzanne Simard found that larger trees share carbon with their smaller relatives, but that they also share with generalizing networking fungi that could pass carbon to unrelated trees.  She surmised that because of the fungi’s ability to reproduce rapidly they could adapt easily to changing conditions and climates. She found that in thriving ecosystems, cooperative communities of plants, animals, and fungi seemed to exist, “where multiple tree species are linked by a network for mutual aid, in the way it takes a village to raise a child .. .[and] that in the long run, the benefits of group cooperation outweigh the costs of individual prerogatives.”[ii]

 As the political situation in this country becomes more and more akin to that of Germany in the late 1930s, I’m particularly moved by Simone Weil’s arguments in her The Need for Roots written during that time, that, in her words, “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul” and that we have roots “by virtue of [our] real, active and natural participation in the life of a community.”[iii]

 As we move into a time designed to set us against each other, when it seems the aims of the state will be directed toward the ultra wealthy to the detriment of the poor and working classes, we will need each other more than ever.  We will need to stay connected to each other, to be rooted and participate in our communities, to be able to provide solidarity and aid during what could become difficult times. “Ecosystems are so similar to human societies,” writes Simard, “they’re built on relationships. The stronger those are, the more resilient the system.”[iv]We can become the alternative to those who want to promote division and an environment of each one for themselves – an alternative which instead believes in the goodness and caring of people to help each other out, whether in times of need or out of a general belief in good will. 

 Isn’t this keeping Christmas with us all through the year after all, like the mycorrhizal fungal networks, by promoting a spirit of generosity and good will toward each other and embracing our rootedness in community.

[i] The Serviceberry – Robin Wall Kimmerer

[ii] Simard, 187-188.

[iii] Weil, The Need for Roots. 41.

[iv] Simard, 189.

 Sources

“Keep Christmas With You (All Through the Year), Sesame Street Music.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. “The Serviceberry.”  Emergence Magazine. October 26, 2022.

Mass Organizing Call: Building Mutual Aid Networks

Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. New York: Alfred. A Knopf, 2021.

Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind.  Trans. A.F. Wills.  New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987.

Woodcock, George. Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements.  Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1962.

 

I'll Be Home for Christmas

♪ “I’ll be home for Christmas . . . .”♪  My dad would tear up as the familiar tune began. It was his favorite Christmas song, but also bittersweet, bringing back memories of the years he couldn’t be home for Christmas with his young family, his little boy and baby girl. Drafted against his conscience in WWII, but feeling duty-bound by his oath to heal the sick and wounded, he spent the war years far from home in the Philippines. Christmas was an especially difficult day when “snow and mistletoe” and the “lovelight” of home seemed particularly far away.

Years after the war was over, he was often called out on Christmas Eve for late-night emergency surgeries, and he’d be driving back late on snowy roads, and as a child I often worried that he wouldn’t be home safe for Christmas. Then early every Christmas morning, he’d put on his bright red vest and head to the hospital for rounds.  As much as my dad reveled in being home with his family on Christmas, I suspect his favorite moments were bringing some holiday cheer to those who couldn’t be home for Christmas.

So many can’t be home for Christmas, whether due to illness, incarceration, family turmoil, domestic violence, war and displacement, or simply because they have no home. In the US, the problem of inadequate affordable housing has given rise to increasing numbers of unhoused. Between 2019 and 2023, the numbers of those experiencing homelessness for the first time increased by nearly 25%, and more than half of these are without shelter of any kind. The end of Covid funding and moratoria on evictions has helped to fuel this increase, but so have rising rents, up 18% in the past five years, and the cost of housing, up 89% in the past five years, and simply not enough homes to meet the need. After watching enough “Call the Midwife” Christmas specials where they always manage to find permanent housing for those in need, I thought perhaps London does it better, but despite their best efforts, including sheltering people temporarily in B&B’s across the city, what they call “rough sleeping” has increased astronomically, with over 10,000 people sleeping on the streets during the year.

In our small city, it’s estimated that 30 families, 59 children, and 1135 individuals are without shelter. Despite the efforts of CHUM, Damiano, AICHO, Life House —the non-profit organizations devoted to providing food, shelter, and other assistance to the unhoused, along with a few Catholic Worker community houses, and a new shelter for youth, Another Door -- life on the streets is precarious. A few nights ago, a few hundred of us gathered outside City Hall to honor the lives of the 61 unhoused people, as well as the five advocates, who had died here in the past year.  Here at least these were no longer statistics. Each person’s name was read, their faces and ages held on placards honoring their memory, many of the ages far too young. They were given honor by the Cedar Creek drum circle and the placards were placed around the sacred fire. The spirit of love and compassion burned bright among those who had cared for each other, who did what they could to ease their loneliness, hunger, and pain; to honor and remember. 

It was a chilly night, around 20 degrees, and after standing in the cold for an hour, I was one of the lucky ones who had a place to go home to, where I could get a cup of hot cocoa and warm myself under a down comforter.  I got home in time to zoom into the Blue Holiday service at my son’s church.  It was a fitting postlude to the homeless vigil – naming the losses, the sorrows, the griefs that seem magnified at this “most wonderful time of the year.”  I was grateful for the welcome given to my tears, for the candles lit for my loved ones lost. For in my small circle are those I love who will never be home for Christmas again – my sister, Jeannie, and my sister of the heart, Pamela.

“When we’re homesick it’s not for places, so much as the faces of the people that we know. . . ,” sang Sara Thomsen and Paula Pedersen in the final song of their annual holiday concert. Without these beloved faces, I wonder if I will ever be home for Christmas again. But then the last line of the chorus took on a different meaning for me . . . “leave a little light in the window, I might be home.” What a lovely thought, I mused to myself. They might be home.  I only need to leave a little light “shining in [my] eyes when I think of [them].” 

As part of the Blue Holiday service, we were invited to summon our love and extend that love and light to others who might be in need of it this season.  It is in the giving, after all, that we replenish our wellsprings of love. I only need to leave a little light in the world. . . .“this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” 

That ultimately was the reason my dad chose to spend the war in army hospitals rather than in prison.  As he wrote in his journal on January 16, 1942, “If I stick to my original declaration of being a conscientious objector – and I am still objecting – I would probably have to go off to a CO camp for the duration of the war – or to prison. . . What would I accomplish by such a procedure? I would certainly be letting people know that I, for one, could not reconcile war with Christianity.  But would I not be hiding my candle under a bushel basket?”[i] Instead, he chose to shine his light of healing “to all alike – our soldiers, the enemy, and civilians.” His letters home at Christmas remarked on receiving the Christmas fruitcake.  I imagine he shared it with his fellow doctors, nurses, enlisted men, and patients, so that all could, for a brief moment, be home for Christmas.

. . . . .

I’ll be home for Christmas this year, though without my sister and my friend, home will be a little different.  But it will also be brightened in new ways. This is the first Christmas our grandson, Marty, is old enough to delight in the Christmas stories and songs, in “Frosty the Snowman” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” but mostly he’s enchanted by the lights. So on Christmas Eve, we’ll light a little Christmas tree in his room, and the Solstice tree in our bedroom, and the Christmas tree in the living room, and then “leave a little light in the window,” and one “by the backdoor, too,” and with great gladness welcome my son and family home for Christmas.

With wishes that all might find a way to be home, or to be a home for others, this Christmas and beyond.   

 

The ice candle leaving a little light by the back door — thanks Andrea.

 [i] The reference is to Matthew 5:15-16: “Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. Let your light so shine. . .”

Continuing the Conversation

TO: Pamela

SUBJECT: continuing the conversation

Thanksgiving Day 2024

Dear Pamela,

I looked for your email this morning. Every morning for years now I have looked forward to your email from the day before -- the last one from you sent at 4:37 on Tuesday afternoon. Did you ever see my response – my wish for you to know joy this Thanksgiving, my sending much love – sent at 6 AM the next morning, the morning you left this earth? The bulk of it was full of mundanities. How differently might I have written it had I known it would be the last you would see.  Our ongoing call and response email conversation -- now without response forever. . . .

This morning I still need to write to you who has held my deepest joys and sorrows of how my dear friend died yesterday morning --of how I wailed when I got Bill’s text, of how I couldn’t even talk through my sobs and screams to reassure David my grief was not about Paul, of how I collapsed to the floor, pounded it, cursed the day, threw the phone that brought the horrific news of your passing.  The immensity of my grief has surprised me – though I don’t know why.  How often did we say to each other we could not imagine life without the other? I no longer have to imagine. I am forced to live it. 

Yet it is still unimaginable to me that you are gone. You are everywhere here – in the dozens of cards you’ve sent -- on my dresser, and tables, and fireplace mantle; your many gifts of dragonflies – the metal one on my dresser, the copper and birchbark ones on the wall, the one on the cup I hold drinking your tea, the one at the bottom of the bowl holding the Thanksgiving chocolates, the bag that has carried bundles.  You are present in all the books you have given me -- on the bookshelves in my room and office and living room and sitting beside my bed. So often at Christmases we would give each other the same books and smile. Our minds traveled in the same direction.  

I’m dismayed that I have no photos of us together.  For the past several months I’ve been intending to take one.  I always thought there would be more time. And then there wasn’t.

But I have words, so many words.  Words in the cards you have given me over the years, in your lengthy and detailed responses to my blog posts, in the one thousand email threads passed back and forth between us over the past several years. I’ve saved them all.  They were too precious ever to delete.

Ours was a friendship of words -- how we both loved words, their poetry, their capacity to communicate, convey, confound, console, comfort. How I looked forward to your words every day.  In the years when my sister began slipping away from me, you filled the void – being the one to whom I now turned with wonderful or upsetting news, those things that begged to be shared with one whom was always eager to receive it – to celebrate with me, to mourn, to support, to affirm, to be a listening ear; the one to whom I’d send the latest photos of Marty or of a particularly beautiful sunrise, or a recording of Paul’s service, or the link to a podcast I knew you’d enjoy.

For years I have entrusted my daily thoughts, worries, joys, activities, hopes, and the occasional dream to your tender care, always knowing your response would be a mirror, reflecting me back to myself, yourself reflecting on all I had written – giving witness and testimony, always with the deepest of care and affirmation. As Adrienne Rich wrote in the poem we both loved --  “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev” – I have never seen/my own forces so taken up and shared/and given back.   Yes, this – the immensity, the intensity, the profound reciprocity of our sharing.

A friendship of words, yes, but also of deep affection and concrete acts of care – of food given and shared, of flowers sent, of your careful editing of my manuscripts, of our encouraging each other to bring forth our writing into books – how I wish you had finally written yours, of gifts exchanged.  You loved giving gifts more than anyone I have ever known, and did it with such thought and care, down to the wrapping paper.

In the beginning, our hearts had brought us together.  I’d given you a copy of my Journey of the Heart when I learned of your own heart troubles.  An invitation to share a meal soon followed – the first of many. I still remember that first real conversation when we began to know each other and the surprise we felt in finding someone with whom we shared such similar interests, ideas, books, authors. I basked in your brilliance – the questions you asked, the insights you shared, the provocative thoughts – you challenged me to think more deeply, entertain different perspectives, explore a thought widely.  You made me better.  How I will miss your intellect – your stunning mind.  You were brilliant till the end.

You were the unexpected gift of my older age. How often did we say that to each other?  Our lives already so full of good and long-lived friendships, we did not expect or need another so late in our lives.  Yet what a blessed surprise that there was this one more – and this one of such rare sympathy of minds.

As a gift to you for your birthday last year, I wrote a post on friendship, and it was with you in mind that I wrote these words:

It is a rare gift – to have one’s words received, given back, with care and understanding; for someone to ask, “How are you?” and want to know; to ask “How can I help?” and then respond; to ask in order to know more deeply; to answer with the fullest measure of one’s honesty and be responded to in kind; to know there is someone to whom one can turn in tragedy, knowing they will mourn with you, or in excited joy, knowing they will celebrate your joys with you with a full and generous heart.  I have been blessed in my life to have known all of these.  I hope I have given in full measure in return.

You assured me that I had.

In the past four years of Covid isolation, our friendship only deepened. Because you were as careful as I, you were the one friend with whom I could visit indoors unmasked.  We were unmasked with each other -- honest, vulnerable, open, sharing the deepest truths of our lives – such a rare gift, this intimacy of souls.

We spoke of death and dying often.  We were both so against it.  Despite the tragedies, the hardships of a body slowly deprived of its capacities, the despondency and dread of what lies ahead in the next four years, and the cruelties of the world, we craved life.  You so wanted to live.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

These your watchwords -- spoken at your wedding, to be spoken at your memorial, with which you began each day -- you lived that “yes” with every often hard-earned breath. You plumbed life to its very depths. You loved your family and friends with such constancy, intensity, and delight. You knew such joy. You were enchanted with beauty – of words, people, the earth, music, the lake and the full moon rising, the wild waves, the deep blue.

After you died, I looked for you in the first book you gave me, a book you edited – Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude. How fitting. In the preface you wrote: “We turn to poems for solace, wisdom, comfort, joy.”  You might as well have written that that is how I have turned to and what I have always found in you.  You continued, “We wrap ourselves in words – words of mourning and grief, words of mystery, words of gratitude and remembrance. As unique as each life is, so is each death. And yet, in our isolated grief and mourning, we turn to the comfort, the embrace of the words of others.”  In my isolated grief, I turn to the comfort of your words, thousands of words, written over days and months and years.

Looking back over our volumes of email exchanges, the subject headings reflect our lives -- “thank you,” “balm,” “despair,” “resilience,” “beautiful day,” “joy in the beholding,” “beginning again,” “wonderful to be with you.”  It was indeed so wonderful to be with you.  It will be so hard to be without you. Thank you for these years of rare and wonderful friendship.

It is fitting that the subject of our last email thread was “gratitude.” I have been so grateful for you every day. To repeat back to you your own words in the last card you sent to me, I am celebrating our friendship – the ways it is rooted, how it branches out, how it reaches for the sky.  What a gift.  I am so grateful.

e.e. cummings’ poem continues --i who have died am alive again today. You are alive today in my heart, in my memories -- of all the conversations before the fire with cups of apricot-infused black tea and Lorna Doones, and in all the conversations we have yet to have, at least in my mind. Some of our email subject lines were entitled “continuing the conversation.” We had so much more to say to each other, and in these few days since your death, I have continued to talk with you every day.  Sometimes I hear your response. That’s how I imagine it will be now – my continuing the conversation, then listening for your response. I know it will come.

Much love,

Beth

Thanksgiving

Foreword: I began writing this post in the first days and weeks after the election. In the wake of a second and even more bizarre and dangerous Trump presidency, it hardly felt like a time for celebrating a national holiday, especially one as complex as Thanksgiving, complicated as it is by the juxtaposition of the mythologies of the relations of the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag with  the realities of the genocide of Indigenous peoples of this land, upon which I reflect here.

. . . . .

Thanksgiving in the United States and the colonies before has gone through several iterations – from the mythologized feast of the Puritan colonists in Plymouth, Massachusetts with the indigenous Wampanoag following the successful corn harvest – corn the Wampanoag had taught the Puritans how to plant after half of them had starved to death the previous winter; to George Washington’s Thanksgiving proclamation giving thanks for the successful ratification of the US Constitution; to Abraham Lincoln in 1863 acceding to Sarah Josepha Hale’s 36-year quest to establish Thanksgiving  as a national holiday -- “to heal the wounds of the nation.” Goodness knows we could use that now, but it seems farther out of reach than ever.

Lesser known is the proclamation of a day of thanksgiving by the Massachusetts Bay Company to celebrate their defeat of the Pequot nation following the Pequot Wars of 1636-1638 in which most of the Pequot peoples were killed or enslaved, giving rise to many Indigenous peoples observing Thanksgiving as a National Day of Mourning.

Among the myths about Thanksgiving I was fed as a child was the idea that my ancestors had come to North America in search of religious freedom, but they had already found that in the Dutch city of Leiden. In America they sought a better life for their children than the one of hard labor they had in Leiden. They did desire religious liberty above all, yet paradoxically also were intent on imposing their religious beliefs on others. They saw in America an opportunity to take up the crusade, as William Bradford, governor of the Plymouth colony wrote, of “propagating and advancing the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world,” which he regarded as “unpeopled,” in the sense of “being devoid of all civil inhabitants, where there are only savage and brutish men . . . .“[i]

Ah, the savagery and brutality done by these “civilized” Englishmen and their heirs to Indigenous peoples across all of America in the name of “advancing the kingdom of Christ,” and pursuing their “manifest destiny.”[ii]  It continues to this day – in the rise of Christian Nationalism and in Trump’s hateful rhetoric soon to become policy and its embrace by white Christians who have empowered him to take office once again.[iii] 

“If there is hope, it lies in the proles.”[iv] That line from George Orwell’s 1984 has been echoing in my mind ever since the election.  In his dystopia, the proles were the underclass of that totalitarian society, the ones who lived under the radar, who might still know beauty, friendship, and love.  The closest equivalent in the US today are the original inhabitants of this land and their descendants. 

The dystopia many of us now are facing in the wake of the election is nothing new for Indigenous peoples. As Krystal Two Bulls, Executive Director of Honor the Earth wrote following the election: “Indigenous folks have been navigating the settler colonialism, militarism, capitalism, and fascism this country was founded on for well over 500 years now. Our struggle is not new and will not be won on the timeline of elections. It is only by building our own power, together, that we will secure Land Back, Sovereignty, Justice, and true Freedom. It’s up to us to care for our communities and to create the world we want to see. It always has been.”[v]

Land Back is the centuries’-old effort to return indigenous lands to Indigenous hands.  This means restoring Indigenous sovereignty over lands that have been stolen.  At the very least, as Indigenous climate activist Jade Begay has explained, in the US this would include the co-management or Indigenous-led conservation of public lands, Bureau of Land Management lands, national parks, and national forests.

An intermediary step to restoring indigenous lands to Indigenous hands is the voluntary land tax movement -- suggesting those of us living on stolen land pay a monthly rent to Native nations or organizations in our area.  “Paying land taxes is a regular reminder to all of us that unpaid debts to Native nations still exist,” writes the Native Governance Center. “While they’re no substitute for the United States government following through on its promises, land taxes can pave the way for a larger movement for accountability.”[vi] 

In addition, despite being less than 5% of the world’s population, Indigenous peoples manage or have rights to around 25% of the world’s land area, and the lands under their care are refuge to 80% of Earth’s remaining biodiversity.  Ensuring Indigenous sovereignty and legal authority to give or withhold their consent over lands they manage is the best hope for climate justice and the future of the planet. 

On this Thanksgiving and every day, I am thankful for Indigenous peoples, for their resistance and resilience in “creating the world [they] want to see,” a far better world than the one of patriarchal power and greed in which we are immersed. As a white settler, I’m questioning the appropriateness of turning to indigenous peoples for hope in these dire times. Is it too much like my colonizing and appropriating ancestors?  I have pondered often the words of a colleague who, when giving a lecture on local Indigenous treaty rights, said the best thing any of us settlers could do for Indigenous people is to leave.  Short of that, the best I can do is support every possible effort to restore land to Indigenous hands, to ensure Indigenous sovereignty, and then get out of the way.

As Begay has said, “When Indigenous peoples are resourced and networked, they have the power to change the world.”[vii] The power to change the world in a good way.[viii] 

  . . . . .

Afterword: In the dark days after the election, it was difficult for me to summon any impulse to give thanks – the antithesis of the value of gratitude Robin Wall Kimmerer so often invokes as central to indigenous ways of being in the world. But as she wrote, “Each of us comes from people who were indigenous. We can reclaim our membership in the cultures of gratitude . . . . “[ix] In the past few days, in a time that is feeling quite raw and vulnerable, I have felt deep waves of gratitude pouring through me for the simplest acts of friendship, of care – grateful for this community of so many interwoven lives – for the many ways we reach out to and hold each other in this tender time.  For this, and so much more, I am grateful. This is how we continue to create the good life.

References

Beyond Land Acknowledgment: A Guide - Native Governance Center

Bradford, William. “Sundry Reasons for the Removal from Leyden,” from History of Plymouth Plantation, written 1630-1650. Sundry Reasons for the Removal from Leyden - Collection at Bartleby.com

DeVega, Chauncey. “The ultimate answer to why Donald Trump won: White Christians.” Salon. The ultimate answer to why Donald Trump won: White Christians

Johnson, Ayana Elizabeth. What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures.  New York: One World, Random House, 2024.

Orwell, George. 1984. New York: New American Library, 1977.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall.  Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigneous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Press, 2013.

Thanksgiving 2024 ‑ Tradition, Origins & Meaning | HISTORY

Two Bulls, Krystal. Honor the Earth. Emails, 11/5/24 and 11/14/24.

Voluntary Land Taxes - Native Governance Center

[i] Bradford, William. “Sundry Reasons for the Removal from Leyden,” from History of Plymouth Plantation, written 1630-1650. Sundry Reasons for the Removal from Leyden - Collection at Bartleby.com

[ii] “Manifest destiny” is the term coined in the 1840s claiming a God-given right of white Americans to expand the United States across the continent under the pretense of spreading “Christianity and democracy.”  It has continued to be used by various administrations to justify various US interventions in foreign governments.

[iii] Like the Puritans, Christian Nationalism seeks to impose its interpretation of Christianity on the entire nation. Its adherents include Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, and many in Trump’s circle. Eight in ten white evangelicals and six in ten white Catholics and non-evangelical Protestants voted for Trump. By contrast, 86% of Black Protestants voted for Harris. 

[iv] Orwell, 60.

[v] Krystal Two Bulls, email. 11/14/24.

[vi] Voluntary Land Taxes - Native Governance Center. Several of these programs already exist – the Shumi Land Tax supporting the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, an Indigenous women-led organization; Real Rent Duwamish supporting the Duwamish people; the Wiyot Honor Tax in northern California; and in Minnesota, the Mni Sota Makoce Honor Tax. See Homepage - The Sogorea Te Land Trust, Real Rent Duwamish - Real Rent Duwamish, honortax.org, The Mni Sota Makoce Honor Tax - Native Governance Center.

[vii] Begay, in Johnson, What If We Get It Right?, 392.

[viii] For more information on ways to contribute to this effort see landback.org, Honor The Earth, and Beyond Land Acknowledgment: A Guide - Native Governance Center.

[ix] Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 377.

Buckthorn: A Cautionary Tale

In the past couple of days I’ve been clearing buckthorn from our yard and woods.  Buckthorn is an invasive species, poisoning the surrounding soil so that nothing else can grow, and sending its tentacles out so that it quickly overtakes existing flora.  What begins as a single shoot here and there quickly becomes a thicket.  It has completely overtaken the woods at Hartley Park, not far from where I live, and has been appearing in ever denser patches in parks and woodlands throughout the city. 

Elderberries

When I first saw one or two buckthorn bushes in our yard several years ago, I thought, “How lovely.  We have elderberry bushes. I’ve never seen them here before.  I should try making elderberry jam.” 

Buckthorn berries

I’m lucky I didn’t.  A friend who suffered under the same case of mistaken identity made what she thought was elderberry syrup, and though she only ate a spoonful of what seemed to her a far too bitter brew, spent the ensuing evening in intestinal distress.  Just as the buckthorn poisons the ground around it, so are its berries toxic, and when ingested are a powerful laxative and emetic.

Robin Wall Kimmerer describes buckthorn as “the invasive species that follows Windigo footprints (374). I would liken it to the Windigo itself – taking over everything in its path with its insatiable greed.  Not content to share the earth, it must own it all.   

The Windigo, in Anishinaabe legend, is the monster of the hungry times – the depths of winter when food is scarce and hunger is large. A monstrous oversized man, with frost white hair, yellow fangs, and a heart made of ice, the Windigo is a human who has become a cannibal monster and everyone it bites becomes a cannibal, too.  Its needs, its hungers, its greed are insatiable.  “The more a Windigo eats, the more ravenous it becomes. . . . Consumed by consumption, it lays waste to humankind. . . Born of our fears and failings, Windigo is the name for that within us which cares more for its own survival than for anything else” (304-5). 

The Windigo is in our midst. More US voters than not chose to put a man into the office of the presidency who has so often been described as caring only about himself.  His seemingly endless greed for wealth and power, and his ability to infect others with the same, certainly places him in the category of the Windigo. He undoubtedly has fostered cannibalism amongst us, inciting us to turn on each other, to eat each other alive as it were.

“The fear for me is that the world has been turned inside out, the dark side made to seem light. Indulgent self-interest that our people once held to be monstrous is now celebrated as success. We are asked to admire what our people viewed as unforgivable,” Kimmerer writes (308).  Over the past several months people in my circle of friends and acquaintances have been baffled by how among his faithful Trump could do no wrong – the more abhorrent his behavior, his rhetoric, his lies, the more they clung to him.  In this man we are asked to admire lying and licentiousness, abuse and assault, dehumanization and divisiveness, grift and greed. The world it seems has indeed been turned inside out. 

The Windigo is in our midst as well in our seemingly bottomless pit of profligacy. “Drill Baby Drill.” “Shop Till You Drop.”  The slogans urge us to spend, to extract, to “grow the economy,” as if growth were a good in and of itself, as if we do not live on a finite planet, as if our excesses had no consequences for the lives and well-being of others with whom we share this planet and the very earth itself, and as if that didn’t matter. To those lured into the spell of the Windigo, which is most of us, it doesn’t.  Or we want to believe it doesn’t matter in the sense of being of no consequence.  I suspect one reason part of the electorate chose Trump was because he encourages the self-deception that in gorging our gluttony we do no harm, and perhaps even a little good.

It's easy to be lured in, to be deceived.  The buckthorn bush is shiny and green, the berry ripe and luscious-looking.  We can be duped into thinking it’s tasty, even good for us. But the tale of the Windigo tells us to beware -- that the impulse to self-indulgence sows the seeds for self-destruction.  It urges instead self-discipline, limits, might we even dare say generosity.

It’s difficult to eradicate buckthorn. With the rapid rate at which it spreads it is easy to become overwhelmed by the enormity of the task, give up, and simply let it take over. I fear this in our country right now. But the task is not impossible.  It takes persistence, a good pair of loppers, and helping hands.  To paraphrase Marge Piercy: 

Alone you can begin, remove a bush, maybe two,

But two people, back to back, can cut through multitudes, give each other support.

Three people can eradicate an acre,

With hundreds, a forest.

 

And to continue in Piercy’s own words:

“it starts when you care

to act, it starts when you do

it again after they said no,

it starts when you say ‘We,’ . . .

 

Sources

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Press, 2013.

Piercy, Marge. “The Low Road.” in The Moon Is Always Female.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980: 44-45.

Fire and Flood, Drought and Deluge

It had already rained nine or ten inches when my brother, who lives just outside Asheville, North Carolina, texted the family to let us know they were okay.  When I talked with him briefly the next morning, he said they’d been shop-vac-ing their flooded basement most of the night and were exhausted, and the rain kept coming.  That was early Friday morning, and the last any of us heard from him.  We had been gathering in Ohio for my sister’s memorial service, and for all of that day and the next, the constant refrain among us was, “I haven’t been able to reach Bruce. Have you?”  None of us had – on Friday, on Saturday, on Sunday. By then, we were all aware of the tragedy unfolding in Asheville.  Finally, sometime on Monday, we were able to reach them.  My brother and his wife had been without water, power, internet, and cellphone for four days, but they were okay.  Their house was still standing and they had a tankful of gas in their car, which is how they were able to charge their phones.  They’d flushed toilets by draining water from the hot water heater and a neighbor had loaned them a camp stove. My sister-in-law had mistakenly ordered forty cans of tuna, and it had stood them in good stead after they’d eaten all their perishables. Once I-26 opened, they were able to make the long, circuitous drive to northern Georgia where Gen’s son lives.  They would be all right.

Back home in Minnesota, we were under Red Flag warnings.  Since June’s non-stop rain it had barely rained a drop.  Four months without rain had plunged much of the state back into drought conditions.  With record high temperatures and high winds, conditions were ripe for forest fires.  Everywhere I hiked, especially the highest elevations, seemed like a tinder box that could be set ablaze by the slightest spark, and the stream beds were mostly dry.

Then Hurricane Milton hit the gulf coast of Florida.  Friends there whose house had been damaged a week before by Hurricane Helene headed to Alabama, trying to outrun the storm.  When they returned, they found their home destroyed. 

A month later, when a loved one suffering from dehydration sought help at a local urgent care clinic, they were turned away due to a shortage of IV fluids.  The main manufacturer and distributor of IV fluids, Baxter International’s North Cove plant, located in Marion, North Carolina, was flooded out by Hurricane Helene.  60% of the nation’s IV fluids are manufactured there, and with the plant not operational, hospitals and clinics are rationing their use of IV fluids for the most urgent cases and critical patients.[i]

These stories of the ways climate change has hit close to home in the past few weeks are only the tip of the iceberg.  Climate change knows no national borders and boundaries. A year ago, one third of the entire country of Pakistan suffered devastating floods, even though they contribute only 1% of the world’s greenhouse gases. In Malawi, thousands suffered from heatstroke and dehydration due to average temperatures of 115 degrees. Just this past week, a year’s worth of rain fell in just 24 hours in Spain, causing massive flooding with a death toll of nearly 160 people. A few days ago The Lancet released their 2024 report of the effects of climate change on human health worldwide, stating that of the fifteen indicators monitoring the health effects of climate change, ten have reached concerning new records: “The rapidly changing climate poses threats to communities in every country, who are faced with rising temperatures, deadly weather events, changes in suitability for infectious disease transmission, wildfires and droughts.”[ii] 

Climate change is undeniable, devastating communities and impacting every aspect our lives large and small – from inflation and the cost of housing and food, to migration and immigration, to war and violent conflict, to health and the very air we breathe and the water on which all life depends. We briefly become aware of those massive weather-related events of climate change deemed newsworthy, but the everyday creep of climate change is so slow that for the most part it doesn’t make the news. We may even come to regard it as simply the new normal. Yet, as the coral reefs die, the permafrost melts, and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation – better known as the Gulf Stream – begins to collapse, we are confronting what climate activist Bill McKibben has called “. . . the greatest danger humanity had ever faced.”[iii]

Yet, astonishingly, climate change is not front and center as the issue affecting all of us and the world in the 2024 presidential election, though most of the issues that the electorate is focused on – the economy, immigration, inflation – are intrinsically related to climate change. And while the US electorate may not be focused on the issue of climate change, the rest of the world is closely watching not only the presidential but also Congressional elections, knowing full well that the stakes for the health, well-being, and survival of humanity and the planet could not be higher.

With regard to climate change and the future of the planet, the difference between the two presidential candidates could not be more stark.  Donald Trump has continually called climate change a “hoax.”  When he was previously in office he set the fight against climate change backwards — from removing all the solar panels that President Obama had had installed on the White House to pulling the US out of the Paris Climate Accord. Should he win, he plans to roll back all regulations on oil and gas drilling.  Project 2025, which sets the agenda for a Trump presidency, calls for the elimination of energy efficiency standards, ending subsidies for electric vehicles, taking the US out of international climate treaties as well as agreements that would help other nations adapt to climate change, and repealing the Inflation Reduction Act, which has been called one of the biggest actions to fight climate change in the world.[iv] Taking its lead from its leader, the Republican Party platform is completely silent about the climate, the environment, and energy policy.

While centering most of her talking points about climate change on jobs and the economy rather than climate change itself, Kamala Harris has a clear record of regarding climate change as an extremely urgent issue and of acting to address it. In her remarks to the COP 28 Leaders’ Session last year she said: “The urgency of this moment is clear.  The clock is no longer just ticking, it is banging.  And we must make up for lost time. And we cannot afford to be incremental.  We need transformative change and exponential impact.  As nations, we must have the ambition that is necessary to meet this moment. We must lead with courage and conviction, and we must treat the climate crisis as the existential threat that it truly is.  It is, dare I say, our duty and our obligation.”[v]  And in contrast to the Republican Party platform, the Democratic Party platform mentions the “climate crisis” and actions to address climate change over eighty times, devoting several pages to specific policy actions to address the climate crisis, energy efficiency and costs, and environmental justice. In 2022, the Biden-Harris administration passed the historic Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which has led to the creation of over 270 clean energy projects across 44 states and created over 170,000 jobs, the majority in Red states, and at the same time created “Justice 40” to insure that 40% of the sustainable development and economic benefits of the IRA will go into communities that have been burdened by environmental injustice. In addition, the administration pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 and 100% carbon free electricity by 2035 – “one of the most aggressive climate agendas” the world has seen to date. [vi]

In 2020, eight million registered voters in the US who said that the environment and climate change was their #1 issue did not vote in the presidential election.  In 2022, even more, 13 million, did not vote in the midterms.  We cannot afford such callous disregard and inaction in the 2024 election. We are at a crucial moment, with the earth at so many tipping points, that failure to vote with the planet and climate change foremost in our minds in this presidential election would be the height of US voter ignorance and arrogance and threaten life on earth as we know it. Yes, there are many complicated issues in this election and nothing is perfect, but time is of the essence.  We cannot afford not to act.

In an interview in Ayana Johnson’s important book, What If We Get It Right?, food justice advocate Leah Penniman told of how her ancestral grandmothers forced onto slave ships braided seeds into their hair to insure food and a future for their descendants. She goes on to say, “ . . if these ancestors, facing horrors I can’t imagine, still had the hope to carry seeds, then I sure as hell better not give up on my descendants.”[vii]  In this election season, I echo her urgent plea not to give up on ours and the world’s. Vote as if their lives depend on it, because they do.

[i] Shortage of IV fluids leads to canceled surgeries : Shots - Health News : NPR

[ii] 2024 Report - Lancet Countdown

[iii] MicKibben quoted in Johnson, 141.

[iv] The Global Story Podcast BBC World Service: How the US Election Could Change Our Climate, Bing Videos

[v] Remarks by Vice President Harris at COP28 Leaders' Session, "Fast-Tracking the Just, Equitable, and Orderly Energy Transition" | The White House

[vi]The Global Story Podcast BBC World Service: How the US Election Could Change Our Climate,Bing Videos

[vii] Penniman quoted in Johnson, 69.

"Love the Sky!"

The other night, my husband and I went out to the nearby soccer fields, where we had a clear view of the western sky, to wait and watch for the Tsuchinshan-ATLAS comet.  Named for the two observatories where it was discovered, in China and South Africa respectively, the comet was only discovered a year ago, and is not expected to return for 80,000 years, if at all. 

Hale-Bopp

I’d fallen in love with comets when Hale-Bopp graced us with its presence for over a year from 1996 to 1997.  It was my constant companion on my drives home from teaching night classes. It felt like my friend, and I missed it when it was gone.  

Tsuchinshan-Atlas

So I was not about to miss this once-in-a-lifetime comet! We waited and watched, waited and watched. As we waited, several dense flocks of geese — there must have been hundreds — flew overhead, well worth the wait in and of themselves. Finally, my husband said, “I see it!”  It took me a moment, but then I saw the faintest white line right where my astronomer friend, Bob, had said it would be.  (Thanks, Bob, for the great directions!) As the night grew darker, the streak became a smear and then clearly the comet and its tail.  The very sight of it was exhilarating, suffusing my entire being with utter delight.

A few other people had also come to the soccer fields that night in search of wonder. One young man, Matthew, generously invited us to view the comet through the astronomy binoculars he had set up on a tripod.  The sight was stunning!  The comet was so bright, the tail so long and luminous, and better viewed together in the camaraderie of fellow comet seekers.  “Love the sky!,” Matthew exclaimed as he eagerly drew our attention to other night-sky marvels of the Andromeda galaxy and Cassiopeia – the queen of the night.

My brother, Bruce, taught me to love the night-sky when he got his first telescope at the age of nine. He’d set up his telescope in the backyard and show me the rings around Saturn and the moons of Jupiter.  When we were older, we’d sit on the dock late at night in August watching the Perseid meteor shower, something that’s become a family tradition. We all have wonderful memories of watching shooting stars together. “There’s one!,” someone would shout. “Where?,” another would respond. But it had already gone, so fleeting. But every once in a while one would streak across the sky for at least five to ten seconds, and we’d all “Wow!” in unison.  Sometimes we’d see twenty or more in an hour. What a light show!

More of a morning person than a night one, I’m more likely to greet with gladness the winter constellations visible in the pre-dawn hours — Orion – the name of my first dog, and my favorite, the Pleiades – the seven sisters.  Whether in the evening or early morn, the moon, in all of its phases, always enchants.  

Daytime sky delights abound as well.  Who doesn’t stop and marvel for a moment when a rainbow appears out of the blue?

But more than anything it’s the sunrise — whether aflame with orange, or glowing a subtle rose peach apricot lavender turquoise and mauve, or simply a bright yellow ball — that lifts my gaze to the heavens, beginning my day in awe. 

“Love the sky!,” Matthew repeated throughout the magical evening. As the small group of us together marveled at the comet that night, a string of lights like a diamond necklace raced across the sky to the east. “Elon Musk’s satellites,” one said.  This bizarre sight, clearly of human rather than cosmic origin, was indeed Musk’s Space X Starlink satellites. Even though I am using them to send this over the internet, it is not without wondering if they are not the antithesis of loving the sky, for more and more questions are being raised about their impact on the fragile layers of the sky in the higher reaches of the earth’s atmosphere, as well as the risks they pose for accelerating climate change on earth. I remember my brother excitedly taking me out to view Sputnik 1, the very first satellite launched into orbit by the Soviet Union in 1957 when I was five. But now, decades later, the atmosphere is littered with satellites and their debris. Scientists are concerned about the effects on the mesosphere – the middle layer of the atmosphere – which until recently was “calm, unspoiled and empty,” [i] and even more about the effects on the extremely sensitive stratosphere, where the ozone layer that protects us from harmful ultraviolet radiation lies. The emissions from the rockets used to launch the satellites pollute the stratosphere with black carbon, carbon dioxide, and water vapor from the kerosene fuel they use. Scientists speculate they also could cause temperatures in the stratosphere to rise up to two degrees Celsius, further degrading the ozone layer.

Lasting only about five years, as the satellites fall back to earth they leave more pollutants in their wake.  Scientists have found non-naturally-occurring chemicals from spacecraft in about ten percent of the stratosphere.[ii]

The Starlink satellites are even threatening the very night sky that astronomers, professional and amateur, love.  Not only do the satellites interfere with images taken through both optical and radio telescopes, they also pollute the night sky with artificial light.[iii] As the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA), stated recently, "The number of low Earth orbit satellites planned to launch in the next half-decade has the potential to fundamentally shift the nature of our experience of the night sky.”[iv]

In addition to polluting the sky, in violation of the Clean Water Act, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has also polluted bodies of water near Texas.[v] Environmentalists are especially concerned about the levels of mercury -- a neurotoxin and one of the most serious threats to water systems in the US -- in the wastewater pumped out from the SpaceX water deluge system.

With the accelerating pace of Musk and now Amazon launching spacecraft and satellites into space,[vi] spewing contaminants from sky to sea and potentially destroying the atmosphere that allows for life on earth as we know it, loving the sky must also mean loving the earth – the one planet in the solar system, perhaps the galaxy, and even the universe, perfectly positioned to sustain life. This requires putting limits on such launches before any more harm is done.

…..

The sky has been replete with wonders of late – the solar eclipse in April, the Perseid meteor shower in August and now the Orionids, four supermoons, the many stunning displays of Northern Lights over the past several months with more on the way, and now the Tsuchinshan-Atlas comet. 

The sky seems to be gifting us with the very antidote we need during this time of frayed and fraught politics – granting us opportunity after opportunity for awe. As I wrote in a previous post,[vii] people who experience awe are more open, curious, thoughtful, generous, kind, willing to put aside self-interest in favor of others, less prone to political polarization, and more likely to experience joy. In other words, just what we need right now.  It is as if the universe is offering its best and wants our best in return.

As Shug says in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, “People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back. . . . It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect. . .. Everything want to be loved” (178).

Love the sky!

Sources

 Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Washington Square Press, 1982.

Photo credits for photos of the crescent moon, the solar eclipse, the shooting star, and the Tsuchinshan-ATLAS comet to the contributors to Wikimedia Commons, and for the Aurora Borealis photo to Bob King. The rest are my own.

Mourning

Grief is the experiencing . . .

Mourning is the process,

when we take the grief we have on the inside and express it outside ourselves —

writing, planting, burying, burning, rising up

ceremony, ritual, community[i]



As long as I stayed here, I could keep you with me . . . 

Time suspended in the two weeks after you died – the only expectation to prepare for your farewell. There were photos to gather, an obituary to write, a service to plan, a eulogy to pen, meals to plan, accommodations to make, miles to travel. And then we gathered, in your home – each arriving in turn -- your husband and son and his wife, myself, our niece and her friend, then your older son, wife, and their many shared children and grandchild, your younger son’s children, and finally my son.  You would have loved to have seen us all gathered together in your home that has been so empty of your presence and was now so full. 

The next day we gathered again, this time at the church you have attended for so many years, the pews of late mostly empty as the congregation has dwindled, now filled with family and friends. This time there were more of us, family that hadn’t seen each other for years, little ones you never even had the chance to meet.  Paul sang for you, Johnny played his cello, your sons and I spoke our love to you as your grandchildren wept -- they loved you so. Downstairs your friends shared stories, and laughter, and love. 

In the evening we gathered again – your children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, husband, and I.  All we needed was to be together . . . but you are missing from the family photo.

And then we parted. I headed north, to this home we have shared for sixty years. We had so often sat on this hillside together, with our morning cups of tea, or watching the sunset, or chatting away the afternoon.  This lake where you’d sailed and canoed and so loved to swim, and patiently taught each child in turn how to swim as well. This dock that held generations of our children and dogs all crammed together, where we’d lie in the sun or sit late at night and watch the stars come out, or cuddle up in blankets trying to catch a bit of the sun’s warmth on windy, fall days.  The piano where we played duets; the table where we played endless games of Yahtzee with Mom, canasta with Nana, Flinch with the family; the circle of couches and chairs where we played telephone Pictionary, charades, and CatchPhrase – you’d always place the beeper in your lap so you could use both hands to express what you were describing, even though you needed to pass it quickly to the next player. So much warmth and hilarity here. The kitchen chair where you always sat facing the door and the hallway so you could greet each person every morning with such welcome and delight as they straggled out of bed. The big table outside where we’ve shared countless meals and you’d ask each of us to share what had been our favorite part of the day. The porch we reclaimed from the storage closet it had become, and made inviting and cheery with the final touch of the strawberry candle. The bedroom where you’d slept, a bedroom we often shared with a dog between us, and where we’d snuggle and talk about our lives, where I’d tuck you in to keep you warm and where I’d given you one final hug the last time you were here.  The road where we’d go for family walks – eight, ten, twelve of us all together, and always two, three, or four dogs. The roadsides where we’d pick wildflowers – Mom’s favorites of Queen Anne’s lace and chicory. The driveway where we’d greet and hold each other with great gladness after months of separation, and where we’d hug and say goodbye, and hug again, and say goodbye, and then hug once more because in the back of our minds we’d always be wondering if this was the last time.  . . . until it was.

On my final morning the sky and lake were a soft pink, the clouds in the west reflecting the light of the rising sun in the east. A seagull flew round the lake then disappeared over the hill. All that time you were still with me. As long as I stayed there, I could keep you with me.  . . .

But as I closed the cottage door one last time, I felt my life, your life, our together life closing behind me, and the sobs that I’d contained for days rose loud and hard, and accompanied me as I left you behind and drove away. 

For mile after mile, hour after hour, in what felt like a funeral procession, the trees appeared, dressed in their brightest finery of reds, yellows, oranges, and greens, lining the roads as if to pay their respects. I could sense them bowing, silently paying homage, all of them inviting my grief to flow.

But here, returned to the world, there are schedules to keep, mail to sort, bills to pay, clients to see, appearances to keep up. Life has gone on as I stepped out of time and now must run to catch up, but I am out of step with its demands and rapid pace. I am better suited for the days when people wore black armbands for a year, maybe two, after the death of a loved one and people, like the trees, understood.

In the indigenous grief ritual, the circle is divided into eight parts, we name our griefs and place each in one of the parts of the circle.  We color each piece with the hues our sorrow evokes and place on it the medicines – the herbs, berries, leaves, flowers, and feathers -- we need to heal.

Today each piece of the circle would be filled with you. I’ll color each one like the leaves outside my window, slowly turning from the green of life to the yellow you loved – how fitting that the earth is bathed in yellow right now – and on each one I’ll place a feather for you who so loved birds.  In the days to come, I will gather each feather that crosses my path and place it in my circle of grief, my circle of arms now empty of you, each one a token of my love for you.

The medicines that crossed my path today -- gifts from the earth -- a feather, a yellow buttercup, and a forget-me-not.

[i] From my Indigenous Focusing-Oriented Trauma therapy handbook section on grief.  This writing is the ceremony, the feather-gathering my ritual, and you who are reading this, my community.  With gratitude.

Of Tear-Water Tea and Aurora Borealis

Silent tears had moistened my eyes and gently rolled down my cheeks when I first learned of my sister Jeannie’s passing, but it wasn’t until I made myself a cup of tea the next morning that the wrenching sobs I’ve come to know with other losses in my life poured out of me.  Tear-water tea, Owl called it, filled with all things sad.[i] On so many of the mornings my sister and I spent together over the years, we began the day by sharing cups of tea.  Making myself a cup of tea on the first morning of my life that I no longer had a sister, my sister, evoked the memories of all those precious early morning moments -- our time, long before anyone else was awake -- as well as the deep ache of knowing we will never again share tea and sympathy in the morning. 

I needed Jeannie’s sympathy today, and kept wanting to call her to talk with her about the loss of my sister.  She was my holder of sorrows, my celebrant of joys, my confidante and companion through life.  My only comforting thought on this day was thankfulness that she never had to know this grief of the loss of her sister.

I was supposed to go first.  She had sat at my deathbed too many times - when I was twenty and the hospital called my parents and sister to come quickly -- it was a matter of hours or minutes they had told them; a year later, when I awoke in the dimly-lit CCU to find her standing beside me, crying large loud tears, and my trying to comfort and assure her through my semi-conscious haze;  and again many years later when I would awaken in another CCU with her again weeping silently by my bedside.  She has been by my side through so much – helping to care for my little boy in the years I was waiting for my transplant and being my main caregiver in the weeks after. 

Ten years my senior she was my role model, my caregiver, my teacher. She took care of me from a very young age, always tending and watching over me.

I so admired who she was and everything she did and wanted to be just like her. I spent hours swinging between her bedposts watching her get ready for school or for dates, listening to her 45s, and wearing her formals when I played dress-up. We had so many twin dresses, play suits, and swimsuits —which I loved, though at 12 she wasn’t particularly pleased that she still was so small she had to wear children’s sized clothes!

She taught me so many things – how to tie my shoes and lace my ice skates; play Fox & Geese, Black Jack, and Spit – so many fast and furious games we had of that (until our arthritic hands made them ridiculously slow, which we laughed about heartily as we played – two old women together); sing the songs she learned at camp – “The Ash Grove,” “A Ram, Sam, Sam,” and “Doodle-ee-Doo”; play “Night and Day” as a piano duet — we had such fun playing duets together; and recognize cardinals, bluejays, flickers, and peewees by their songs. Mostly she taught me how to be kind – “Let’s be fairies and clean up the house before Mom and Dad get home,” embrace joy – I always thought of her as the joy-bringer for life was always better when she came home from summer camp and college; and love unconditionally – for that’s the way she loved so many; that’s the way she loved me.

Jeannie loved sunshine and grabbed every minute of those sunny rays on the first warm days of spring.  We spent far too many hours lying in the sun together.  She loved swimming and had the most graceful crawl stroke I’ve ever seen. She loved daisies and the color yellow – nearly everything she wore was yellow. 

She often told the story of filling her classroom with drawings of yellow suns so it would be filled with sunshine.  She loved being a teacher.  I remember how excited she was as we decorated her first kindergarten classroom.  She’d come home each day filled with stories of something special that happened with a child that day.  As a first-grade teacher she gave years of her life to nurturing young minds.  She loved birds, and every month of every year she would teach her first-graders a new bird of the month – its size and colors, song, habitat, characteristics. We’d be walking in the woods and she’d stop and say, “Listen.” How she loved the wood thrush and song sparrow.  After our mom died, she’d hear the call of the chickadee -- not the “chickadee, dee, dee,” but the “ee- eee” -- and say, “That’s mom.  Can’t you hear her?  She’s saying, ‘Jeannie.  Jeannie.’” But the bird she loved best was the goldfinch – it’s bright yellow after all.  Her greatest pleasure in life was watching the birds at her many bird feeders, and when she ended up in a memory care facility in the final weeks of her life, both her boys made sure that she had a bird feeder right outside her window.  Her friend, JoAnn, told me that Jeannie had told her that what she wanted written in her obituary was to ask people to scatter bird seed in her memory. 

Jeannie and her lifelong friend, JoAnn.

Mostly Jeannie loved her friends and family.  She loved her times with her group of good women friends, especially her best friend, JoAnn. They’d met in second grade when they’d both moved from the city of Akron to the small village where we grew up and commiserated over how much they didn’t like their new school. Thus forged the friendship of a lifetime – with long walks around the village with JoAnn’s dog, Penny; being maids of honor in each other’s weddings; having children around the same time; visiting on the phone over the many miles that separated them physically but never emotionally and traveling to be with each other as often as possible; playing Words with Friends until the last years of my sister’s dementia made that impossible; sharing a final farewell in the last hour of my sister’s life. 

She made a home with her husband, Dick, for over 60 years, where they raised their two sons, Mark and John. And just as she faithfully wrote letters to Dick every day he was in Vietnam at the beginning of their marriage, so he faithfully attended her every evening in the care facility at the end. Jeannie was so proud of her two boys and loved them fiercely. 

She loved being a grandma, her love being returned to her in great devotion by her six grandchildren. She so often told me how she made sure to spend special time with each of them individually and I’m sure she made each one feel affirmed for their unique gifts and who they are in the world.

She was the lynchpin of us siblings – the connecting point between the pre-WWII babies and the post-WWII babies. She had a special affection for our brother, Bruce. When she was eight and he was two he got Perthes disease, and for two years it was her job every day to help him get his braces on his legs. I think she always saw that tender little boy in him whenever she was with him.  We were all three together just a week ago. By then Jeannie was mostly no longer aware and responsive, but when she heard Bruce’s voice and saw him bending down to her in her wheelchair, her face lit up like the sunshine she so loved, she smiled and clapped her hands. That was so Jeannie – delighting and applauding all the people she loved simply for being.

There’s a special bond between sisters, at least there was between my sister and me. We shared everything and understood each other in a way no one else could.  She was the one I’d always call with happy news -- she was with me when my pregnancy test for Paul said “positive!” and was the first one I called after he was born – and the one I’d call with my sorrows and disappointments.  I could turn to her with anything and she’d be there for me.  We spent hours and hours walking and talking. And we could laugh together in a way I’ll never know again.  Even in my last visit with her in May we were just silly together and laughing in that way that sisters do.  She thought my being born a girl and finally having a sister, after ten years of being the only girl with two brothers, was the best thing that ever could have happened to her.  In reality it was the other way around, that being so beloved by my sweet sister from the moment I was born to the moment she breathed her last breath was the best thing that ever could have happened to me.  Who in the world would I have been without her steadfast love, support, affirmation, and tender care a constant in my life?  Among the last things I told her was that we would always be together in spirit.  I trust that we will. 

The last few years of Jeannie’s life were sad and often difficult as dementia slowly stripped pieces of her mind from her. It was often hard to remember the sister I’d always known. But on the day after she died, for the first time in a long time, the shroud of suffering that had lately surrounded her lifted, and I could catch whispers of her cheery, bright voice all around me, a smile in the morning sunlit clouds.  I caught glimpses of her throughout the day – in the hummingbird, whom I hadn’t seen all summer, showing up next to me on my deck; the yellow t-shirt hanging on the line like a prayer flag – the same shade of yellow she loved most and hanging right next my “Donate Life” t-shirt; the single daisy that bloomed out of season on the path where Ben and I walked.  Ben had refused to walk on our usual trail that day, so we went to another – where I’d found the daisy.  Perhaps he wanted to be sure I saw it.  He is wise that way – helping my cup of tear-water tea be filled instead with joy. As my mother would so often say, “Weeping may tarry with the night, but joy comes with the morning.”[ii]

On the night my sister died, in those moments when she was passing through the veil, the heavens here in the north were bright with colorful lights.  I’d like to think of them as Jeannie dancing in the light, free, joyous – a bright light in the universe.  She was in mine.   

Do you see the angel wings?

My deep gratitude to my friend, Bob King, for his generous permission to use his photo of the Aurora that took place on the night of my sister’s passing.

[i] “Tear-Water Tea” was one of the stories in Owl at Home by Arnold Lobel, one of my son’s favorite books when he was little.

[ii] Psalm 30:5.

Sins of Omission

Note: This post is not intended in any way to dissuade anyone from voting for Kamala Harris for President. We cannot afford not to. She brings many of what I call “goods of commission” with her and will continue to as President. Please read this with this in mind.

I’ve been stuck in my writing lately.  The words and thoughts only go so far before they fizzle out. As I’ve been ruminating on this, I suspect it’s because if I don’t write about the topic at hand, I will be committing a sin of omission.

According to certain Christian churches’ doctrines, sins of omission involve failing to do what is right.  While some Christians identify particular inactions as sins of omission – refusing to share Christ with others, neglecting to care for those in need, and avoiding prayer – these are not the topics that persist in my mind, that need voice.

Rather, I’m referencing the omissions of the Democratic Party at their national convention last week.  The first and most glaring was the refusal of the Democratic Party to invite a Palestinian American speaker onto the mainstage despite repeated requests to do so.  It was important that a Jewish family of an American held hostage by Hamas was able to speak, share their story, their pain, and their hopes, but not to include the equally important voices of Palestinian Americans and the plight of those living and dying in Gaza was, in the words of Justice Democrats[i], “a moral failure.”  It violated a basic sense of fairness, and also fundamental decency toward the tens of thousands who have died and the millions who are suffering in this war.  In a sense it also falls into one of the categories of Christian sins of omission – neglecting to care for those in need.  Again quoting Justice Democrats, “the Party must do better.” 

The other glaring omission was the serious lack of attention paid to climate change.  Yes, on the final night of the convention the issue of climate change finally made it to the mainstage as the party looked toward the future, and the two speakers, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Congressman Maxwell Frost made important points in the short time they had to speak. But the two featured speakers of the night – Kamala Harris and Tim Walz– gave it barely a mention.  At first, I thought must have missed it.  How could they neglect what is one the most important issues — if not the most important issue — facing the planet at this moment in time?  I wondered – what were they so afraid of?  Kevin Book, managing director of the research firm ClearView Energy Partners, told the New York Times that he thought that if Harris took a strong position on climate change she would look “too progressive,” and this could tip the balance for the swing state of Pennsylvania.[ii] Is that sufficient reason, or even correct? Here again, the Party must do better.

I have been so filled with hope for the possibilities of turning the political tide  -- of embracing a politics that builds inclusive community for all – including Arab Americans – and prioritizes saving the planet from the impending climate crisis. According to Vaclav Havel, the late former president of the Czech Republic, “Hope . . .is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for . . . success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.”[iii]

The Democrats made the decision to invest in enterprises that in their view are most likely to grant them success in November, and I certainly want them to succeed. However, even here I believe they misjudged and made two grave strategic errors that may well cost them the votes of Palestinian Americans, as well as young people and many others who are concerned about their future on this planet. Indeed, “Muslim Women for Harris” initially pulled their support from Harris and disbanded, though they re-formed a week later.[iv]

But what burst my hope bubble was not the strategic errors, but rather the refusal to work for something because it is good.  Friends and family have urged me toward hope, giving me perspective on all the many political pressures and the strategists who control the narrative, and I know that the Harris-Walz team and the many other Democratic candidates whom I support and want to succeed are working and will work for so many things because they are good.  I need to focus on the goods of commission, rather than the sins of omission. As “Muslim Women for Harris” said when they re-formed after initially pulling their support from Harris,  even though they did not receive the support for Palestinians they were hoping for, too much else is at stake in this election -- "reproductive rights, access to healthcare, climate change, immigration reform, access to quality public education, economic opportunity, and the clear danger a Trump presidency could pose for our black and brown communities." They said it well.

The highpoint of the entire convention for me was the words of Congressman Maxwell Frost, the youngest member of Congress and a beacon of hope for the future of the Party.  He was willing to speak truth to power.  “I’m here to tell you the climate crisis is not some far-off threat.  It is here. . . . I’ve walked the streets of communities that have been forced to rebuild after hurricane flooding destroyed their homes. I’ve heard the stories of immigrant farm workers made to work in horrid conditions exacerbated by this crisis. And I’ve felt the scorching record heat and know that climate change can sometimes feel like an unstoppable force.”  But he urged action, and went on to tie work to solve the climate crisis to other benefits of creating jobs, protecting health, and building strong communities. And then he courageously said these words, “And we must always remember that peace is essential to our climate, and war destroys our environment.”  And I thought, “yes!”  Someone who’s willing to speak against war and for peace, and make the often-neglected connection to the future of the earth. This is someone I can get behind.  This is a Party I can support.  And then, in a way reminiscent of bell hooks, he invoked a politics of love.[v] “When you love somebody, you want them to have clean air.  When you love somebody, you want them to have safe drinking water.  When you love somebody, you want them to have a dignified job.”[vi] When you love somebody, you want them to live in peace. When you love somebody, when you love the earth, you want to do everything you can to insure they not only survive, but thrive. This is my hope.

[i] Justice Democrats is a Political Action Committee (PAC) committed to progressive politics within the Democratic Party and is funded by grassroots donations.

[ii] Climate Change Is Not a Key Talking Point for Harris Campaign - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

[iii] Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala. Trans. Paul Wilson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. 181.

[iv] 'Muslim Women for Harris' Disbands, Says It Can No Longer Support Her (msn.com)

[v] See my post of December 31, 2021.  bell hooks: Feminism as the Transformational Work of Love — Beth Bartlett Duluth

[vi] FULL SPEECH: Gen Z congressman gets crowd on their feet during DNC speech (youtube.com)

 

What Is This Feeling?

What is this feeling that has been filling me of late?  Ah, yes, I remember -- hope, enthusiasm, excitement, optimism!  It’s been so long since I’ve felt this --  on the political scene, for our country, for the world.  But lately I’ve felt buoyant – something I haven’t felt at least since 2016. Rather than avoiding the news, now I am eager for it, seek it out.  Rather than envisioning the Statue of Liberty weeping as I did in my last post, I now imagine her smiling broadly.

The energy, vitality, and yes, laughter that Kamala Harris has brought to the presidential campaign has infused myself and many others I know with a sense of joy, a welcome contrast from the doom and gloom that has been surrounding the campaign for so long. Her ability to laugh, to smile, to find the positives in people, in life, has brought new life to this campaign. Yet for some reason, the opposing side has chosen to focus on Harris’s easy laughter as a target for derision. 

I was struck by a comment made the other day by Duchess Harris, professor of American Studies at Macalester College, regarding the derogatory remarks the Trump campaign has made of Kamala Harris’s laughter.[i] She asked, “What does it mean that people don’t want her to have joy?”  I immediately thought of how Audre Lorde would respond to that question.  Why don’t people want her to have joy -- because of the radical potential of joy to empower us – to demand of our relationships, our work, our worship, our institutions, our lives, and our politics that they be fulfilling of our deepest purposes. As Lorde wrote: “That deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within that knowledge that such satisfaction is possible. . . . Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.”[ii]  

Enhancing our capacity for joy raises the possibility that the polis itself could be a vibrant place of both individual and collective avenues of self-expression, self-determination, and meaning, as opposed to a place of a people so disaffected and disillusioned as to fall easily into the hands of an autocrat or to cling desperately to a cult leader. As I wrote in an earlier post[iii], in his Inciting Joy, Ross Gay asks the question -- what does joy incite?  Incite – to provoke, stir up, arouse. Gay answers his own question: “My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity.  . . . My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow – might draw us together.  It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love.  . . .”[iv]  

It might depolarize us!!  How threatening that might be to the kind of “us vs. them” politics of hate on which the Right has thrived.  “The sharing of joy,” wrote Audre Lorde, “ . . . forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.”[v] Consider for a moment the creative potential, or as Gay says, the “transgressive” possibilities this lessening the threat of difference between us, the depolarization of us, the love between us could bring?  It could up-end the power of those who profit from this polarization and enmity, inviting the subversive possibilities of the “unboundaried solidarity” of being on each other’s side vis à vis the capitalist patriarchy, creating just and right relations with each other and the earth.  Joy incites an uprising of the heart.

It might de-atomize us!  In her study of the origins of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt explained how totalitarianism grows from “atomized, isolated individuals.”  Totalitarian movements demand “total, unrestricted, unconditional, and unalterable loyalty of the individual member. . . . Such loyalty can be expected only from the completely isolated human being who, . . . derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement, his membership in the party.“[vi] The dread that has shadowed my being has been of this potential – of a totalitarianism fomented by those eager to keep us isolated from each other and to prey on a disaffected populace. 

But now, in nearly a blink of an eye, all that has changed, so hungry have people been for a future filled with hope. We are tired of a politic that has divided us from friends and family and each other as a nation. My current sense is of a populace which is ebullient – eager to engage in a dialogical politics that seeks to create what and who it is that we are together; that seeks not just liberty, but also justice for all.  

Ah -- this is the feeling – of a joy emerging from what has been our common sorrow over the looming political nightmare.  I can feel a sense solidarity growing, one that is transgressive of rigid party boundaries.  I can feel us being drawn together “to consider what, in common, we love.” 

I say – bring on the laughter!  Bring on the joy!

 Sources

Arendt, Hannah. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New Edition with Added Prefaces. San Diego: Harvest/HBJ Books.

Gay, Ross. 2022. Inciting Joy: Essays. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books.

Kamala Harris, women in leadership and the ‘glass cliff’ | MPR News

Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches by Audre Lorde. Trumansburg: New York, The Crossing Press.

[i] Duchess Harris on Angela Davis, “Kamala Harris, Women in Leadership and the ‘Glass Cliff,.’” MPR. July 29, 2024. Kamala Harris, women in leadership and the ‘glass cliff’ | MPR News

The reference comes from Donald Trump -- “I call her ‘Laughing Kamala.’ You ever watch her laugh? She’s crazy,” he said, according to a clip of the speech shared online. “You can tell a lot by a laugh. No, she’s crazy, she’s nuts.” Acyn on X: "Trump: Kamala, I call her laughing Kamala. Have you seen her laughing? She is crazy. You can tell a lot by a laugh. She is nuts. She is not as crazy as Nancy Pelosi. https://t.co/EumPAKo2yk" / X

[ii] Lorde, Sister Outsider, 57.

[iii] Joy to the World! — Beth Bartlett Duluth

[iv] Gay, Inciting Joy, 9.

[v] Lorde, Sister Outsider, 56.

[vi] Arendt, Origins, 323-324.

No Reason to Celebrate

Plaintive strains of a slow and somber piano rendering of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful” came across my radio the morning of the 4th of July, and as they did I found myself welling up with tears – not tears of patriotic pride for my country, but of deep sorrow for what it has become, how it has lost its way.

My state of mourning followed upon the Supreme Court’s decisions a few days earlier in Trump v. United States and Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, simultaneously giving the Presidency the powers of a monarchy while stripping federal agencies of their executive function and handing it to the multiple judiciaries around the country. The latter will create a mess of conflicting regulations on everything ranging from the environment to health care.  I privately suspect the conservative majority of the Supreme Court was trying to open the way for mifepristone to be banned in a number of states by creating the possibility for FDA rulings by to be overturned by judges in certain judicial districts. 

But it is the former decision, Trump v. United States, that is of even greater concern, and where my despair is centered. The question before the Court -- triggered by four federal grand jury indictments against the former president for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election by knowingly spreading false claims of election fraud designed to obstruct the collection, counting, and certifying of election results -- was whether or not Trump is immune from prosecution because at the time he committed these unlawful acts he was the President. The Court’s answer in a word --  yes. Because he was President at the time, he’s immune.  Here are the Court’s official words, from the opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts:

“Held: Under our constitutional structure of separated powers, the nature of Presidential power entitles a former President to absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority. And he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts. There is no immunity for unofficial acts.”[i]

In other words, the President can do no wrong.  In other words, the President is above the law.  In other words, the President is a law unto himself. As Justice Jackson wrote in her dissent: “In its purest form, the concept of immunity boils down to a maxim— ‘ [t]he King can do no wrong.”  And as Justice Sotomayor said in her impassioned dissent, the Court has in this way made the President the King. Quoting her here: “The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”

However, Justice Jackson is clear in rebuking the Court for granting the Presidency such immunity, arguing that such a notion was “firmly rejected at the birth of [our] Republic."[ii]  For justices who claim to be “originalists” – those who base their judicial rulings in the understandings of the matter at the time of the creation of the legal document, in this case the US Constitution – their ruling is a far cry from the intent of those who framed the Constitution.  To understand that intent one needs only to read The Federalist Papers.[iii]  Alexander Hamilton, in his commentary on the thought behind Article II of the Constitution which outlines the powers of the Executive branch of the government, is quite clear that the Framers intended to grant no such immunity to the President.  To the contrary, it absolutely states that in contrast to being above the law, as is a king, the President is liable for criminal actions:

The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law. The person of the king of Great Britain is sacred and inviolable; there is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable; no punishment to which he can be subjected without involving the crisis of a national revolution. [iv]

It was exactly this inviolability — this ability the sovereign under the notion of divine right to be answerable to no one and to commit acts with impunity — against which the Revolution was fought.

So on this day celebrating the overthrow of the rule of divine right and absolute power, and instituting popular sovereignty in their place, I find no reason to celebrate, for the Supreme Court has declared all of that null and void.  It has laid the foundation for the government of the United States to become authoritarian, based on the whims and actions of one person, accountable to none.

In one fell swoop the Court greatly increased the power of the Presidency and the Courts – by granting the Court the power to decide what acts of the President are “official” and which are not – and diminished the power of the only branch of the federal government that is democratically elected by the people – the Congress.[v] As Justice Jackson noted in her dissent, “the Court has unilaterally altered the balance of power between the three coordinate branches of our Government as it relates to the Rule of Law, aggrandizing power in the Judiciary and the Executive, to the detriment of Congress,” adding that  “whatever additional power the majority's new Presidential accountability model gives to the Presidency, it gives doubly to the Court itself,” for the Court now is the determining body as to what is or is not an “official act.”

This ruling becomes even more chilling given the real possibility of Trump -- a self-proclaimed admirer of Russia’s Putin and authoritarian rule in general -- returning to the office of the President.  One need only look at the plan by the Heritage Foundation, called the “2025 Project,” to see what sweeping changes Trump and a faction of conservatives have planned to put in place if Trump is elected.  Among the key provisions are: the reinstatement of an executive order known as “Section F” that would re-classify most federal workers as being “at-will,” enabling Trump to fire any federal worker who didn’t toe the party line; the installation of Christian Nationalism[vi] – putting fundamentalist Christian beliefs at the center of national policy; attacking reproductive rights and health even further; reshaping the Department of Justice better to serve the whims of the President; severely restricting even legal immigration; dismantling LGBTQ rights, the Department of Education, and any mention of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in federal departments and programs; shrinking the EPA, scaling back federal support for renewable energy, and increasing oil production – basically declaring death to the planet; and more. The aims of the right-wing backers of Trump amount to setting up the conditions for autocratic rule to implement their destructive agenda, and the Supreme Court just gave them the final power they needed to do just that should Trump be elected.  As Justice Sotomayor put it so forcefully – In the event that the President “orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”

I’ve never been a big fan of the original US Constitution, written as it was primarily to protect the interests and property of select propertied white men and to prohibit the representation of the majority of people in the country.  It has taken multiple amendments and Acts of Congress to begin to redress the inequities and exclusions of the original document, but at least it had this – that every elected and appointed government official was subject to the law of the land.  The Supreme Court decision in Trump v. United States has now eradicated even that.

As I walked along the shores of Lake Superior that 4th of July morning, these lines from “America the Beautiful” kept running through my mind:

America! America!
God mend thine ev'ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.

Would that we were a nation of self -control.  It sadly seems we are so out of control in this moment.  And the liberty that is at least somewhat guaranteed, at least in theory, by all citizens being subject to the law regardless of rank or office has now been undone by the very institution charged with insuring it. 

What gives me hope is that so many are outraged by this Supreme Court’s decision and are giving voice to their indignation.  The people do not want a government unconstrained by law.  Perhaps the people at large will still be a force stronger than the strong arm of a few privileged men in seats of power. At least the people are still able to see what is obvious – that the Supreme Court’s decision is wrong, and dangerous.  We haven’t devolved to the point where we can’t even see that.  That at least keeps the door open to preventing the rise of the fascism and authoritarian government that this decision portends.

What gives me hope is young people.  It has taken me days to fashion this piece.  It has been far too overwhelming to me to put into words, knowing that I could never do justice to the enormity of what has transpired in these decisions of the Court. And then yesterday I heard my son, younger than half my age, put into music all that I had wanted to put into words.

In so doing, he reminded me of the power of music and the arts to keep alive the dream of “liberty and justice for all,” to protest their threatened disappearance, and to inspire the rebellious spirit that breathes life into their constant arising and sustenance in the world, and this too gives me hope.  I leave you as I began, with poignant renderings of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” this time my son’s. To listen, please click on the “Learn More” link below. The piece and the introduction to it begin at the 25:13 mark. His tender and moving rendition of “This Land Is Your Land” begins at the 57:06 mark.

Sources

A guide to Project 2025, the extreme right-wing agenda for the next Republican administration | Media Matters for America

Hamilton, Alexander, Madison, James, & Jay, John. The Federalist: or the New Constitution. Norwalk, CT: Heritage Press, 1973.

TRUMP v. UNITED STATES CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATESCOURT OF APPEALS FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT No. 23-939. Argued April 25, 2024-Decided July 1, 2024

 [i] Trump v. United States, CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATESCOURT OF APPEALS FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT No. 23-939 (2024).

[ii] In doing so, she cited Clinton v. Jones, 520 U. S. 681, 697, n. 24 (1997) (quoting 1 W. Blackstone, Commentaries * 246 (Blackstone)); see United States v. Burr, 25 F. Cas. 30, 34 (No. 14,692d) (CC Va. 1807); as well as United States v. Lee --   "No man in this country is so high that he is above the law. No officer of the law may set that law at defiance with impunity. All the officers of the government, from the highest to the lowest, are creatures of the law, and are bound to obey it." United States v. Lee, 106 U. S. 196, 220 (1882).

[iii] The Federalist Papers  is a collection of 85 documents written by three of the framers of the US Constitution – James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton – and published in New York newspapers to persuade the people of New York to adopt the new constitution.  It is considered to be the main authority regarding the thinking of the framers who wrote the original version of the Constitution.

[iv] Federalist Paper #69.  Emphasis mine.

[v] Even saying the Congress is democratically elected is a stretch since the Senate with two representatives from each state regardless of population effectively grants far less electoral power to those living in populous states and more to those in more rural states.  Plus, the fact that US elections are based on district elections rather than proportional representation makes the way we choose Congressional representatives far less democratic.  And with the US Supreme Court gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder 570 U.S. 529 (2013), many are still denied their right to vote.  The President is still elected by the electoral college, not by the popular vote, a mechanism that in two of the three of the most recent elections prevented the candidates duly elected to be president by the popular vote – Al Gore and Hillary Clinton – from taking office, and allowed the minority candidates – George W. Bush and Donald Trump to assume the presidency.

[vi] For more information on Christian Nationalism, see What is Christian nationalism and why it raises concerns about threats to democracy | PBS News

Home, Again

My recent trip home, and yet not feeling quite “at home” in places I’d once called home, left me wondering about the nature of home. The MS Word program on which I’m writing this tells me that I am “home,” at least that’s the tab that’s open.  Since we live so much on our phones these days, I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense that to navigate to the main menu I need to press the “home” button.  Clearly, this is not the sense of home I’m looking for. Neither is the legal definition of home – more appropriately called one’s “domicile” or “residence” – which, ironically, is defined by one’s absence – the place to which one would return upon leaving.  It’s the place where I vote, have my driver’s license, file taxes, can pay in-state tuition at public universities -- my official “permanent address.” Certainly, home is more than an address, or a physical structure.  A house does not make a home. 

Or does it?  I imagine the hundreds in this city, the thousands and millions around the world, who are unhoused, who might very well be glad to call a house a home – to know the relief of “being home” in the shelter of a physical abode, of knowing with certainty where they will sleep that night and the next and the next, where they will find some measure of physical security, protection from the elements, a place to go the bathroom, get clean, have access to water and ways to cook food, privacy, rest. Perhaps it is the fact that I take of all of these things for granted that enables me to ponder other meanings of “home.”  

I have made various physical structures – from dorm rooms to apartments, offices, and houses – “home” by decorating them to my taste, filling them with photos, plants, books, posters and other artwork, rugs, lamps, mugs and tea, music, the occasional stone, a braid of sweetgrass.  Other places I have dwelled – boarding houses, hospital rooms, friends’ spare rooms and couches – have given me shelter, even food and care, but not a sense of home.  Do the things we surround ourselves with make a home?  I’ve often thought a house is not a home without a piano, books, and a dog. (I always envied my music colleagues’ office spaces at the university because they were able to have pianos.)  I’m lucky to have all three.  Yet while these certainly can make a place “homey,” I suspect they are the surface elements of home.

The sense of home goes deeper. My friend, ecofeminist Greta Gaard has written that “home” “implies an intimacy, a kind of knowledge of place, a set of relationships and commitments.”[1] As such it requires a certain longevity, as well as a commitment to knowing the place and the people.  In that sense, my childhood home was home to me, so interwoven as it was with deep knowledge of the woods, the lake, the fields, the places of community – there wasn’t a street there I hadn’t walked. My family’s lives were intertwined with those of our neighbors, the school, and the church in multiple ways. 

The same is true of the lake in Michigan where my family vacationed and eventually bought a cabin.  I have paddled and sailed and swum in its waters; its hills cradle my soul.  I know where each plant and flower will bloom in its season, where the berries grow, and the mushrooms.  My sense of intimacy extends to the beeches, cedars, maidenhair ferns, and mosses.  I can spot a Petoskey stone from just the smallest glimpse of its surface. I’ve known the people there since I was a girl. Not much in life can compare with friendships of over sixty years.

I’ve made Duluth my home now for over forty years, and it is a making in the way that Greta describes – of taking the time to know intimately the rocks and waterfalls, the way a stream travels and changes with heavy rains, the shifting shape of the sand beach, the places where the bloodroot and ladyslippers bloom, the maples and oaks as they are just beginning their lives and the birches as they are ending theirs, the ladybug hatches, the deer paths, the beaver dams –and of being committed to their well-being. 

It is a making of relationship with the people as well -- the friendships, the work relationships, the volunteering and activism and creation of community; showing up – for the work, for the grief, for the celebrations. Commitment to place and to people is the work of making and shaping a home.

And yet, I’ve also felt “at home” in certain places at the first encounter, with no ties or former knowledge.  The Welsh have a word for it – cynefin – what writer Pamela Petro describes as a sense of “belonging to a place you’ve never been to before.”[2]  Indeed, it was in Wales that I felt that sense so strongly. It was as if the lyrics to the Welsh song were written for me:  

This land of song will keep a welcome
And with a love that never fails
We'll kiss away each hour of hiraeth[3]
When you come home again to Wales

I can’t describe it any better than cynefin.  Everything in Wales spoke to me, called to me. Was it the water, the beach, the mountains, the sheep, the clouds, the rocks, the music, the harps, the language, or the spirit of rebelliousness – Cymru Rhydd!/Free Wales!-- written in Welsh and English on the large jagged boulders I passed several times walking up and down the steep hill to the inn where I stayed?  It was deeper, more mysterious than any of these – it was simply home.  I belonged here. My soul belonged here. 

I first experienced cynefin on the ancient rocks of Lake Superior on Isle Royale.  My family had traveled there via the ferry from Copper Harbor when I was seven.  I spent hours jumping from rock to rock on the shore and even at that young age I knew this was my place of belonging.  So when I had the chance to return to Superior – Gichi Gami --  and make these rocks and water my home, I did. I moved to Duluth to come home.  Every time I leave here and return, at the first glimpse of Superior I feel my soul release.  Even now, whether sitting, standing, or leaping, I feel as if I was born of these rocks.  The Anishinaabe call them grandfather rocks, but they feel more an ancient lineage of grandmothers to me, aligned heart to heart through rock to the heart of the earth.[4] 

Sometimes it’s not so much a specific place as the elements of a place that feel like home – the springiness of a cedar swamp, the smell of sweetgrass in a meadow, the song of a peewee, the lapping of waves, the magic of snow-covered trees, or simply a quality of light. Our first home is the watery world of our mothers’ wombs and for some water continues to be home.  I’ve rarely lived far from water, whether in lakes or streams, and the few times I have, have felt dry in my very core. Others feel most at home in the desert, or mountains, prairies, jungles, or cities.  When I lived in Birmingham, England, I realized the homesickness I was feeling wasn’t for my Minnesota home or even for the States, but rather for forests and meadows. I rarely feel at home in cities and often feel most home in rural landscapes.  Even returning to the one freeway and relatively small city of Duluth that I call home can feel jarring after spending a few days or weeks in the north woods or the farms, woods, and back roads of largely rural northern Michigan where I feel most at home.

But home is about more than place. It is also the people. As feminist theologian Maria Harris has said, “home is the place for entering community . . . not only as being-there, but also as being-with.”[5]  I was born into family with whom I shared a home for many years and they are always entwined with my sense of home.  Friends with whom I’ve shared intimate moments of life and birth, illness and death, tragedy and triumph, and the dailiness of life bring the comfort and familiarity of home.  With them I dwell in what Maria Lugones described as “the world in which one is at ease” – where one is a fluent speaker, knows and agrees with the values and norms, has a shared history and the ability to be playful, and is humanly bonded – loving the people and being loved by them.  And like cynefin is to place, sometimes being “at home” with someone is just an immediate sense. I knew from the outset that my relationship with my husband was right because he felt like home to me. I suspect my dog, Ben, feels the same about me since he melted into my arms the first time I held him and has barely left my side in the more than four years since.

Places, people – these elements of home reside outside of ourselves. Yet the sense of home that I’m after here is more of a “felt sense”[6] – an internal sense, whether of security or safety, of being centered, or settled, – or in the sense of “dwelling” – a place where we can linger long within ourselves.  For many this sense can be elusive.  In all my years of trauma training I’ve learned that feeling at home in one’s body can be a rare thing.  Some people deal with trauma by dissociating – mentally escaping their bodies in order to survive.  Our cerebral culture also takes us out of our bodies.  We live so much in our heads, it can be difficult for people to know what they are feeling, and quickly shift their focus to what they are thinking.  Being at home in one’s body can be particularly difficult for women in this culture which teaches us our bodies are impure, or the source of sin in the world, or mere objects for the male gaze, or as early feminist Sarah Grimké wrote in 1838, “regarded by men as pretty toys or as mere instruments of pleasure,”[7]  or simply wrong.

I love the way young children are so comfortable in their bodies, with no degree of self-consciousness – something we tend to lose as we grow older. But we can regain our embodied selves. In its integration of body and spirit, embodiment is a quality of the soul. So, too, in its integration of place, relationships, self, body, and spirit, is home a quality of the soul. Home, writes Petro, is “a condition of the soul; a feeling;  . . . a harmony with the season or with God or family or the rings of the self; . . . .“[8] We know it when we feel it.

Yet perhaps we best know what home is when we don’t feel at home where we are, when we experience what the Welsh describe as hierath – an awareness of not being at home, or what Petro describes as “an awareness of the presence of absence.”[9] For it is in experiencing hierath that we become acutely aware of what we long for  -- “what place or with whom or under which conditions our souls feel at home.”[10]

Writer Pico Iyer likewise has said that home is “not so much a place of soil as a place of soul” -- “the place where you become yourself.” Better yet, home is the place where your true self is able to grow and flourish. In this sense, home is our “habitat” -- the place where the conditions for one’s life are most favorable for thriving.  In her essay, “Homeplace,” bell hooks described how the homes made by Black women, in addition to being places of shelter, comfort, and the feeding of body and soul, were also places where “we learned dignity, integrity of being…  where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts, . . . where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world . . .[places]to grow and develop, to nurture our spirits. . . . where we can heal our wounds and become whole.”[11]   

Whether with another or with ourselves, in a particular place, or as a condition of our lives, this  -- the sense of being integral and whole, at one with ourselves – is home.

 

Sources

Gaard, Greta. The Nature of Home: Taking Root in a Place. Tucson: U. of Arizona Press, 2007.

Grimké, Sarah. Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and Other Essays.  Bartlett, Elizabeth Ann, ed.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Harris, Maria. Dance of the Spirit: The Seven Steps of Women’s Spirituality, New York: Bantam, 1991.

hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990.

Iyer, Pico. “Where Is Home.” TED talk. 2013.

Lugones, Maria C. 1990. “Playfulness, ‘World-Travelling,’ and Loving Perception.” In Anzaldúa, Gloria. Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color.  San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. 390-403.

 Petro, Pamela. The Long Field: Wales and the Presence of Absence, a Memoir. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2023.

[1] Gaard, The Nature of Home, 7.

[2] Petro, The Long Field, 70.

[3] I define the Welsh word hierath a bit later on.

[4] The last thing I remember before my cardiac arrest at the public hearing about turning that particular stretch of shoreline into a “safe harbor” was the two men in front of me muttering to each other that they didn’t see what the big deal was --they were just a bunch of rocks.  “Just a bunch of rocks,” I wanted to say to them.  “These are some of the oldest rocks on earth, ancient, wise, resilient, holders of deep memory and the story of the land. They deserve our reverence and respect.”

[5] Harris, Dance of the Spirit, 101.

[6] “Felt sense” is a term first used by psychiatrist Eugene Gendlin that refers to an internal bodily sense that can tune into with increased self-awareness.

[7] Grimké, Letters, 56-57.

[8] Petro, 302.

[9] Ibid., 294.

[10] Ibid., 316.

[11] hooks, Yearning, 41-42, 49.

Home

“I’ll be glad to be home,” I wrote to a friend after days on the road, sleeping in different beds, disruption to my normal routines. 

And yet, I thought to myself, all of this time, I’ve been home -- home, yet not home --for the first place I’d landed was the cabin in Michigan where I’d spent my childhood summers, and weeks and months nearly every year since.  It is the place, more than any other, that I consider my soul home – the place where I feel most at peace, most connected to the land, to family, to myself, my spirit.  Yet the constant rain and cold had made it feel inhospitable in a way I had not previously experienced. I longed to be warm. Perhaps I simply hadn’t had the time to settle in, for it was just a wayside rest on my journey. I still had the dreaded truck-laden highways of southern Michigan and northern Ohio to traverse. 

I was finally making the trip to see my sister in her home in northeast Ohio, a trip I’d made countless times, but where I’d not been since the beginning of the Covid pandemic.  The trip was still fraught for me.  Immunocompromised as I am, being a two-day drive away from my healthcare providers should I get Covid, and not being in control of my environment -- as I am of my very Covid-safe environment at home -- added elements of anxiety to my travels.  It had taken me this long to feel comfortable enough to go into a public restroom, wearing a mask, of course, something I needed to be able to do on this long a trip on urban roads.  Perhaps home is where the healthcare providers are.

As I approached the exit on the turnpike nearest where my sister lives, I gazed out on the familiar scenery – the stunning beauty of the Cuyahoga River valley after miles of flat, unremarkable terrain -- and I felt at home, and yet not.  When I was young, I’d spent so many hours in that metropolitan park – now a national park, in the hills and sandstone ledges above the valley, the site of so many family picnics and adventures.  My first husband’s parents and mine lived on opposite sides of the Cuyahoga, and for several years the winding road between them was a treasured journey, especially in the midnight hour between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. That was but a memory now.

The route from the turnpike exit to my sister’s home that was once a maze of several different roads and turns is now a straight-line freeway, so different from my years growing up here. It exits onto the road that borders the village where I grew up. As I drove, I passed the lake where I swam, the country club where I went to my first awkward seventh and eighth grade dances, the place by the lake where my adolescent gang of girls spent so many hours laughing and talking in the willows by the lakeshore, the home of my 8th grade boyfriend -- but I passed the turn to the road that would take me to my childhood home. My sister lives a mile or two down the road, and that’s where I was headed.

After I’d moved away in my twenties, my sister’s home was my home away from home, especially in the summer after my mother’s stroke, and again after my mother died and my father was living at home with a caregiver.  He had become completely disabled with Parkinson’s and the dementia he’d plunged into after the car accident that killed my mother.  He’d been driving, and the grief and guilt seemed to make living in his body/mind intolerable and he’d mostly left it.


When I’d come to visit at Christmas and summers, I’d stay with my sister. We’d have our early morning chats over cups of tea before anyone else was up, go for long walks – often in the village where we grew up, or around her neighborhood.  I’d play with her boys – my best buds then and now in their adulthood -- go to their soccer games, play croquet in their backyard, and make our daily trip to the Dairy Queen. Our dogs would romp together.  Many years later, my son went to college an hour away from my sister’s, and that’s where I’d stay whenever I’d go visit him.  She and her husband were regular audience members in his many concerts there over those four years.  Her home was also my regular stop when I’d make the long drive to upstate New York where my son was in grad school. My sister and I would often drive into the Cuyahoga Valley for long walks along the towpath, or walk around the village where we grew up, or go to concerts at Blossom – the summer home of the Cleveland Symphony, or just sit on the couch in her family room watching the multitudes of birds at her many feeders – her favorite pastime. Her home was my home when I returned for my parents’ memorial services, my high school and college reunions, and the spring I helped care for her after her hip replacement.  All told, I’ve spent months and years of my life at 1739, and know it as well as I do my own home.

And then here I was, and it was home, so familiar to me, and yet not, for my sister is no longer home in her body/mind most of the time.  Perhaps it was her presence more than anything else that made this feel like home all those years.  At least she still knows who I am and seems glad that I am here. But it is disquieting being here with her here and yet not, and makes me long for home, my home. 

On my last day, I took a few hours away to visit a long-time friend from my college days.  On my way there, I drove through the place I called home for so many years -- the village where I grew up -- past my house, my grade school, my friends’ houses, the lake where I learned to swim, my church.  Yet, at the house where I grew up it all looks different. They’ve changed the shutters and front door, cut down the pine tree we loved to climb, as well as the exquisite dogwood in the front yard that was my favorite tree in the world.  So many of the houses that were there when I was young have been torn down and replaced with McMansions that the place is in many ways unrecognizable to me. But the schoolyard, the baseball fields, the schools’ portico -- with the letters spelling out “Silver Lake School” that my 8th grade class gifted to the school decades ago -- still look the same, as does the church where I went to Sunday School, sang in the choirs, got married, and buried my parents. Nevertheless, despite spending the first twenty years of my life there, the village no longer feels like home. It was such a great place to grow up, but my home is elsewhere now.

My friend lives in the town where I, and my son, went to college, and oddly, this was feeling more like home to me than my hometown, even though I lived here for only three years, and my son for four.  This was my first home away from home, the first place where I made my own home away from my parents’, and where my son made his.  What an exciting time – for both us.  We both remember it as some of the best years of our lives.  As I drove through campus, along the street with the new music building where my son spent most of his time all four years he was here on one side and the dorm where both he and I had lived on the other, I felt embraced by a sense of belonging.  During my time there, I lived in every single one of the women’s dorms (they weren’t co-ed then as they were when my son was in school there), but it’s my freshman year dorm, where I’d awake at sunrise and listen to the bagpipes, that still feels most like home --that, and the field behind the dorms where I first read Camus’s The Rebel -- the touchstone of my life. Erik Erikson [1] would say that this was the time and place where I forged my identity, my sense of self, and to a certain extent that’s true. Perhaps that, and the fact that it is also infused with my son’s presence and impact here, is why this place, of all the homeplaces I’ve visited on this journey, still holds a sense of home for me.

On my last night with my sister, for a short while she returned, and we were silly and laughing and sisters together in the way that only sisters can be. Snuggled together on that couch in the family room where we’d spent so many hours of our together lives, for a moment I was home there, too.  Perhaps home is where the heart is after all, for in that brief hour my heart was full  -- of love, mirth, gratitude, and the sense of belonging together that is home.

[1] Erik Erikson was a psychologist best known for his eight stages of psycho-social development.  When I went to college at 18, I was still in the stage of “identity vs. confusion,” so it was a formative time.  Coincidentally, it was also in college that I first read Erikson and learned about his eight stages -- one of the things I learned in college that has stayed with me all of these years.

Sojourner Truth

On May 29th, 1851, a striking, very tall, African American woman rose to speak at the Women’s Rights Convention being held in Akron, Ohio. There Sojourner Truth gave her famous “Ain’t I a Woman Speech.” 

Originally named Isabella, and known as “Bell,” Truth was born into slavery in 1797, the second youngest of James (“Bomefree” – Dutch for “tree”) and Elizabeth (“Mau-mau Bett”) who were enslaved by a wealthy Dutch man, Johannes Hardenbergh, Jr., who had a large estate in Ulster County, New York, which was inherited by his son, Charles, when Truth was just an infant. Upon the death of Charles, at the young age of nine, she was sold at auction to John Nealy, where she “suffered ‘terribly-terribly’ with the cold”[i] and beatings. In her own words, “He whipped her till the flesh was deeply lacerated, and the blood streamed from her wounds – and the scars remain to the present day.”[ii] She prayed for deliverance, and soon after was sold to a fisherman and tavern owner, Martinus Schriver, where she led “a wild, out-of-door kind of life,” carrying fish, hoeing corn, foraging roots and herbs for beer.  Only a year later she was sold again to John J. Dumont, where she lived out the remainder of her enslavement until her emancipation by the State of New York in 1828. She described her life there as “a long series of trials” which she did not detail “from motives of delicacy,  . . . or because the relation of them might inflict undeserved pain on some now living”[iii] whom she regarded with esteem. Knowing the conditions of enslaved women, we can deduce what those trials entailed. Despite her affections for a man on a neighboring estate, who was beaten to death for visiting her when she was sick, she was forced to marry a much older man, Thomas, also enslaved by Dumont, with whom she bore five children. Because Dumont reneged on his promise to free her, she walked away with her infant daughter in 1827 and was taken in by the Van Wegener family where she lived for the next year. 

Eventually she moved to New York City, where she joined the Zion Church and met up with a brother and sister she had never known, and for a short time joined a short-lived religious sect which took all of the money she had saved over the years.  As a result, she became sure that the Golden Rule of “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” had not been practiced on her. Developing a revulsion toward money, she felt called by the spirit to leave New York City, to travel east and to lecture and preach.  In 1843, she took up the name of “Sojourner Truth,” from then on made her way in the world as an itinerant preacher in the camp revival meetings sweeping that part of the country at the time.  She drew her religious beliefs and inspiration from her mother’s assurance that there was “a God, who hears and sees you,” who “lives in the sky.”[iv] Illiterate, she memorized the entire Bible by asking children to read it to her.

Gaining a reputation as an eloquent and passionate orator, her travels would lead to her meeting abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, who enlisted her in the anti-slavery movement, where she also met many involved in the women’s rights movement.  In 1850, she dictated her Narrative to Olive Gilbert. Living on the proceeds from its sale, she moved to the Quaker city of Salem, Ohio, the headquarters of the Anti-Slavery Bugle, and it was from there that she traveled to the Women’s Rights Convention held forty miles away in Akron in 1851, and gave her famous speech.

The speech recorded by Frances Gage several years later, with the “ain’t I a woman” refrain, is the one with which most are familiar, though the actual speech as transcribed at the time by Marius Robinson, while similar in content, does not contain the refrain, but rather she simply states that she is “a woman’s rights” woman.[v]  It is unlikely that she spoke in the southern dialect Gage used in her transcription, since she grew up knowing only Dutch, eventually learning English as spoken in New York, and probably spoke with a Dutch accent. Much of the content in the Gage version was fabricated – such as the statement that she bore thirteen children, when she only had five children, though she did cry out in a mother’s grief when she learned that her only son, Peter, had been illegally sold south to Alabama.[vi]

In the more accurate version of Truth’s speech, she claims women’s equality with men by referencing her own story – how she had done “men’s” work all her life and was equally as strong, remarking “I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? . . . I can carry as much as any man. . . I am as strong as any man that is now.”  Indeed, her former master said of her, “’that wench is better to me than a man—for she will do a good family’s washing in the night, and be ready in the morning to go into the field, where she will do as much at raking and binding as my best hands.’”[vii] She didn’t claim the same intellect as a man, perhaps because she herself was illiterate, but she didn’t think that should disqualify women from having the same rights as men, and certainly, she argued, women should be able freely to exercise the intellect they did have.  Finally, as a religious and faithful woman, referencing Eve and how women have been subordinated to men because of “Eve’s sin,” she argued, “if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again.” She spoke of how Jesus welcomed women, never rejected them, and perhaps most famously notes how Jesus was born of God and a woman, and asks, “Man, where is your part?”  I can imagine the few women in the mostly male crowed laughing and cheering at that remark! She closed by saying “the women are coming up blessed be God.”  She went on to deliver speeches throughout Ohio and Indiana on a speaking tour for women’s suffrage. 

Though she never actually used the line, “Ain’t I a woman?”, this was the essential question of her speech, for certainly Black enslaved women had been doing the work of men and been treated as enslaved Black men and worse for centuries in this country.  But as a Black woman, she had not been regarded as a woman, but rather as something else, something lesser.  Her remarks raised the consciousness of her listeners, and advocated equally for racial and gender equality. 

During the Civil War, she helped recruit Black soldiers for the Union Army, and afterward was honored with an invitation to the White House. She became involved in the Freedman’s Bureau and helped those formerly enslaved find employment and start new lives.  She continued to work for women’s suffrage all of her life, and split with Frederick Douglass when he put Black male suffrage ahead of female suffrage. As she said in a later speech, “There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping things going while things are stirring.”[viii]  She eventually settled in Battle Creek, Michigan, where she lived out the remaining years of her life.

As a native of Akron, I had long been aware of the lack of any tribute to Truth in Akron, and for years from a distance had been hoping to connect with others who were interested in taking up such a project with me.  At long last, I was able to find someone in the Women’s Studies department at the University of Akron who connected me with the Sojourner Truth Project, a project that had been begun decades ago, but had languished after its leader, Faye Hersh Dambrot died.  It was picked up again in 2019.  Since then, the excitement has built as funds have been raised and a plaza dedicated to Truth has been built under the leadership of Towanda Mullins, who garnered the support of the Akron City Council’s Park and Recreation Committee and then the full Council. And on the 173rd anniversary of Truth’s speech, the evening of May 29th, 2024, a six-foot bronze statue of Truth, created by local artist Woodrow Nash was unveiled. It was a great celebration with guest speakers, including one of Truth’s descendants, music, a ribbon cutting, and of course, the unveiling.

The Sojourner Truth Legacy Plaza in which the statue stands is a stunning tribute to her life, with a path winding throughout marking the milestones of Truth’s life.

 

Four pillars rise up from the plaza in remembrance of the four pillars of the Old Stone Universalist Church where Truth gave her speech, each one dedicated to the four pillars of her life and beliefs – activism, identity,  power, and faith. Placards on the pillars display famous quotes from Truth’s life.

The landscape architect who designed the plaza, Dion Harris, remarked that he “wanted to make every aspect mean something,”[ix] and he certainly succeeded in doing that. Being in that space, surrounded by her life and words and visage was a very powerful experience for me.  As Harris said of her, “Truth was one of those people who took her truth, took how she lived and was able to tell everyone about it and make something positive happen in the end if she wasn’t alive to see some of it.”[x]  I have long admired her, and am so grateful to all those who made this possible, and am thrilled finally to see her life and legacy honored in the place where she first gave that famous speech.

 

Sources

Schreck, Isabella. “Plaza dedication to honor legacy of Sojourner Truth,” Akron Beacon Journal, May 26, 2024, 1A and 5A

Truth, Sojourner. “Keeping Things Going While Things are Stirring.” In Kolmar, Wendy K. & Frances Bartkowski, eds. Feminist Theory: A Reader.  4th Ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 2013. 91-92.

Truth, Sojourner. Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Ed. and with an Introduction by Margaret Washington. New York: Vintage, 1993. 

[i] Truth, Narrative, 15.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid., 18.

[iv] Ibid., 7.

[v] For a comparison of the two versions of Truth’s speech, see Compare the Speeches — The Sojourner Truth Project.

[vi] She worked with lawyers and the grand jury in New York to secure Peter’s return and eventual emancipation, and was the first Black woman successfully to sue a white man.

[vii] Truth, Narrative, 20.

[viii] Truth, “Keep Things Going,” 92.

[ix] Harris, quoted in Shreck.

[x] Ibid.