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.

Flashback*

*the reliving of a traumatic event, as if it were happening in the moment

Listening to the news on my way home the other night, I heard one of the protestors at Columbia express her concern that the university’s response to the protests -- bringing militarized police to campus – could result in another Kent State or Jackson State.  I share her concern. With campus protests against the war in Gaza and calls for universities to divest from corporations supporting the war erupting around the country, images of students protesting the war in Vietnam, soldiers marching through the streets near and on the Kent State campus, tanks rolling through town, and helicopters circling overhead on those early days in May 1970 have been repeatedly flashing through my mind. 

I was a naïve, mostly apolitical senior at Kent State High School at the time.  I’d heard about the protests on campus, but frankly was more concerned about our last Aqua Charms show, the final choir concert, classes, final exams, prom, and graduation than I was about protests against the ongoing war in Vietnam. I’m sure I was unaware of the escalation into Cambodia that prompted that latest wave of campus protests.  At a party in Kent on the Saturday night before the shootings, we heard the stories about the smashing of windows of businesses downtown  -- more by drunken revelers than anti-war protestors -- the night before, but didn’t think much of it until we saw the smoke coming from campus, which we later learned was from the burning of the ROTC building.  Things took a serious turn, and we avoided campus on our way home. We’d heard that the mayor of Kent had requested that the governor send in National Guard troops, but weren’t prepared for what greeted us as we rolled into Kent Monday morning.

No one ever talks about the tanks, of how the small city of Kent, Ohio looked like scenes from Czechoslovakia in 1968 when the Warsaw Pact invaded to shut down the protests and political reforms of the Prague Spring. No one ever talks about the helicopters spraying tear gas on local residents who were out in their yards after the imposed curfew. No one talks about the feelings of fear, intimidation, shock, and horror over the police state that had taken over the campus and town, with 1200 National Guard troops marching through town and the terror of snipers rumored to be on rooftops. We all know now how the escalation of a military response to the protests on campus led to tensions so high that even as the protestors dispersed under sprays of tear gas, one of the National Guard battalions turned and shot randomly into the crowd and innocent bystanders, killing four students – Jeff Miller, Allison Krause, William Schroeder, and Sandra Scheuer -- and wounding nine.

The shootings led to further escalation of protests at campuses across the country, including the one we rarely hear about — Jackson State — because this time it was two Black students who were killed and twelve wounded.  As Dr. Gene Young, a long-time civil rights activist reported about that time: “We had had several nights of protests, not only because of what was going on at Kent State, but every campus in this country was in an uproar about the war in Vietnam. . . . Young Black males were being sent to Southeast Asia in disproportionate numbers, and we were concerned about that, in addition to the historic racism there in Jackson, Mississippi.”[i]

On another night of protests, ten days after the killings at Kent State, a crowd of about a hundred had gathered on the street that bisected the predominantly Black campus — Lynch Street (named for John R. Lynch, a formerly enslaved man who became the first Black Speaker of the House of the Mississippi state legislature, not Charles Lynch whose name was the basis for the term “lynching.”) Tensions had been heightened by rumors that Charles Evers, brother of slain activist Medgar Evers, and his wife, had been assassinated. Reportedly white motorists passing through campus were shouting racial slurs at the gathered Black youth, who responded by throwing rocks at white motorists. At one point a non-Jackson State student set a dump truck on fire and 75 local police and state troopers were called to the scene. Phillip Lafayette Gibbs, a junior at Jackson State, a pre-law student, married, with an infant son, was walking by Alexander Hall, a women’s dormitory, that night, and James Earl Green, a high school track star, was cutting across campus on his way home when police suddenly fired over 150 rounds of buckshot for half a minute at Alexander Hall, a women’s dormitory, killing Gibbs and Green, and injuring twelve others. 

Fast forward to the campus protests of today. The scenes are eerily familiar. Most of the media attention has been focused on Columbia University where students took over Hamilton Hall — which they renamed “Hinds Hall” in honor of a six-year old child killed in Gaza by Israeli tank fire — determined to stay until the administration met their demands, and UCLA, where students who had set up a nonviolent encampment protesting the war in Gaza were met with counterprotesters who violently attacked student protestors as well as student journalists with bear mace, barricades, sticks, and batons, but these are not isolated incidents. In recent weeks, students have set up anti-war encampments on dozens of college campuses. Almost 2200 have been arrested, and many more face university disciplinary actions from suspension to expulsion.

Many questions arise, primary among them being the extent and limits of free speech and assembly and the use of riot police to disperse campus protests and encampments — or in the case of UCLA, the complaint that not enough was done to use police to keep the protesters safe from harm. The line between freedom of speech and hate speech as well as speech that incites violence can be a thin one. Frederick Lawrence, former President of Brandeis University, founded in 1948 by the American Jewish community, articulated this well in a recent interview on Democracy Now. “Free expression, free inquiry, academic freedom all have to be given broad range for protection. Where there’s actual threatening behavior, that can be restricted. . . .  But provoking people, challenging people, asking difficult questions, making people uncomfortable, that’s part of the price of living in a democracy, if you will. That’s what it means to live in a self-governing society.”[ii]

Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, also championed having difficult discussions across difference, drawing the fine line between spaces that are too safe and not safe enough. As he said in a recent PBS NewsHour interview, “You don't want the place to be too safe, because then you never encounter anything really disturbing, but you don't want the place to be so unsafe that you're too afraid to really learn. You want to find a middle ground where people can listen to ideas, even offensive ideas, and find out why someone else holds those ideas and maybe in the end learn from them.”[iii]

Suppressing basic rights of free speech and assembly are often the very things that lead to more escalation, not less.  That’s what happened at Kent State. Again, something I’ve not heard many people talk about – the prohibition, whether by the university or the mayor who had declared a civil emergency – for people to gather in groups greater than three, and the university’s banning the scheduled rally at noon on May 4th.[iv] Yet, it seemed like that’s what everyone around me was talking about on that day in May.  I can still hear student passersby shouting, “Come to the rally at noon!” despite the university’s prohibition, while National Guard troops marched, rifles in hand, down the same street. Yes, the students were protesting the recent invasion of Cambodia, but they were also protesting the limitations being put on their freedoms of speech and assembly, as well as the presence of National Guard troops on campus.

Which raises the other fine line -- between police, especially militarized police in riot gear or, as in the case of Kent State, National Guard troops acting to safeguard lives and basic rights of speech and assembly and such forces being used to disrupt and prevent the exercise of such rights. Roth brought an important perspective to this when he discussed the pressure that lawmakers and donors put on university administrators to shut down campus protests, stating, “Professors and presidents have to have the courage to stand up to politicians and donors who want to force us to do things that are countereducational. We need to create safe enough spaces, peaceful campuses where people can agree and disagree across lots of differences.”

 Having experienced the visceral reaction – the fear, the horror, the disbelief – of that much militarized force descending on campus in order to prevent students from assembling, it is no wonder to me that things at Kent State escalated to the point that people were killed, especially with deadly weapons in the hands of the troops (mostly kids themselves and already worn, coming directly from a long Teamsters strike in nearby Akron.) Compound that with the long-standing racism of Jackson police toward their Black citizens and you have the same tragic result at Jackson State.  As Resmaa Menakem explains, “We can have a trauma response to anything we perceive as a threat, not only to our physical safety, but to what we do, say, think, care about, believe in, or yearn for.  This is why people get murdered . . . the body either has a sense of safety or it doesn’t.  If it doesn’t, it will do almost anything to establish or recover that sense of safety.”[v]  

 Far better than bringing in militarized force are efforts to keep dialogue going.  I wonder how things might have turned out differently at Kent State if then-President White, who repeatedly refused to talk with students and attempted to close down their right to express themselves, instead had invited dialogue. Currently, in those places where students and administrators have maintained dialogue – Northwestern, Rutgers, and here at the University of Minnesota among them – peaceful solutions and agreements have been reached.  In the current moment where students are in disagreement with each other over the Palestinian and Israeli conflict, it is especially important to facilitate dialogue with each other.  Again, I refer to Roth’s wisdom on this moment, arguing that rather than inciting violence, “ . . . that habit of talking across difference makes it easier to prevent the outgrowth of violence.”  This habit is one of the main things most university professors, especially those of us in controversial fields, try to instill in students – far from the picture the far right has tried to paint of us. 

 Personally, I’m glad to see students caring so deeply about lives of those at a far remove from their own, and putting their personal concerns aside to express that passion to the world. On the campus where I taught for 35+ years, there were a few smaller protests following racist incidents on campus, and Women’s Studies students staged a sit-in in the administration building when the University administration decided to close our department, but I don’t recall such widespread protests in all of those years, even during two Gulf Wars. (I’m sure there would have been Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, but the campus had been closed since spring break that year due to the pandemic.) I was fortunate to have students in Women’s Studies and Political Science who were committed to social and environmental justice and doing good work for change in the world. I’m heartened now to see ever more young people activated, politicized, caring. 

 At 17, I was living in my own bubble, more concerned about prom and final exams than about the deaths and destruction of lives happening on the other side of the world supported and incurred by my own government.  A year later, I had come out of my easy isolation into the sometimes fraught, often challenging, always inspiring world of what Albert Camus would call “rebellion” – and would not choose to dwell in this world in any other way — for rebellion is nothing less than the action of caring about the lives and dignity of individuals beyond oneself. As Camus wrote, “I rebel -- therefore we exist.”[vi]  To foster that very existence, may we continue to care, to express our compassion for the world, and to listen to one another.

[i] 40 Years Ago: Police Kill Two Students at Jackson State in Mississippi, Ten Days After Kent State Killings | Democracy Now!

[ii] Former Brandeis President on Gaza Protests: Schools Must Protect Free Expression on Campus | Democracy Now!

[iii] Biden condemns violence and disorder as some college protests escalate into confrontations | PBS NewsHour

[iv] The mayor of Kent, LeRoy Satrom, used his declaration of a civil emergency, to impose an 8 PM curfew and was the one who requested Gov. Rhodes send National Guard troops.  The University had imposed first a 1 AM curfew and then an 11 PM curfew, further confusing the issue.

[v] My Grandmother’s Hands, 7.

[vi] The Rebel, 22, emphasis mine.

Earth Day

April 22, 1970 -- the first Earth Day. It was a day filled with excitement – partly because we would have the whole day out of classes, and partly because we would be part of the great celebration that first Earth Day was.  I was a senior in high school, and my entire school went out in teams to clean up trash along the banks of the Cuyahoga River that flowed through Kent, Ohio.  I crossed the dirty river every day on my way to school, but I’d never spent time there, or wanted to.  It mostly was a trash heap – a convenient place for people to dump old tires, appliances, glass bottles and aluminum cans, bed springs, car batteries, seats, and steering wheels – and even whole cars.  But on that first Earth Day, my friends and I spent the day hauling trash out of the river bank.  It was good work.

The Cuyahoga -- the river that gave rise to Earth Day.  In July 1969, the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River that flows through the industrial cities of Akron and Cleveland, Ohio, caught fire again, and this time the burning river caught the attention of Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin.  Inspired by the teach-ins of the peace movement, Sen. Nelson suggested the possibility of similar teach-ins to educate about the environment.  So, on April 22, 1970, Congress recessed for a day so that representatives could listen to their constituents’ concerns about the environment, and a grassroots movement brought twenty million people to the streets, to town halls, to polluted sites, and to beaches and riverbanks for massive cleanups.

The first Earth Day inspired a movement of environmental activism. The Clean Air Act was signed into law later that year, and the Clean Water Act would follow two years later.  Since that time, much of the toxic chemical pollution that regularly was dumped into the air and water in the US has been stopped, and many of the lakes and rivers are seemingly cleaner than they were.  But new threats have arisen.  Despite years of testifying before the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency hearings, litigation, and protest, indigenous Water Protectors and environmentalists were unsuccessful in their attempts to stop Enbridge from constructing the Line 3 pipeline that threatens wild rice lakes throughout northern Minnesota.  Now US Steel has sought permission to release pollutants into Hay Lake, a wild rice lake, raising sulfate levels to eight times the permitted limit.  The good news is that for the first time, the MPCA has decided to enforce a law on the book since 1973 that set sulfate limits in wild rice lakes.  Nevertheless, US Steel is appealing the decision. 

Now one of the greatest threats to water, life, and health is the proliferation of PFAS[i] chemicals. PFAS chemicals are oil and water resistant, making them popular for use in textiles, carpeting, upholstery, non-stick pans, Scotchguard stain protection, and more.  Despite the fact that U.S. makers of PFAS-related products stopped producing PFOS in 2002 and PFOA in 2013, the chemicals are persistent and have contaminated water supplies, and shorter-chained PFAS chemicals continue to be made. Nearly everyone in the US has PFAS chemicals in their system, creating health concerns, particularly for women and children.  They can make it more difficult for women to become pregnant and raise blood pressure during pregnancy, cause development delays in children, and more generally in the population affect hormone levels and the immune system.  The 3M Corporation, based in St. Paul, Minnesota, one of the main manufacturers of PFAS chemicals, dumped toxic sludge in the Washington County and Oakdale landfills for years, and now the toxic chemicals are leaching into the water supplies of several Twin Cities suburbs. The MPCA has plans to stop the spread as best they can and affected communities are developing plans to filter their water supplies, but will it be enough, and who will pay for the cleanup? Three days ago, the Biden administration designated PFAS chemicals as hazardous chemicals under the Superfund law (CERCLA),[ii] making polluters responsible for paying for the cleanup of the chemicals.  It still begs the question, the question I would ask of all of these corporations – whether Enbridge, US Steel, 3M or the countless others who continue to treat the earth and its inhabitants as their dumping ground – why?  Why in the world would you continue to act in such reckless disregard of this precious earth?  Are profit and greed such blinding forces to the fate of life on earth?  It would seem so.

The theme for Earth Day 2024 is “Planet vs. Plastics,” demanding a 60% reduction of all plastic production by 2040. From packaging to peanut butter and salad dressing containers, bottled water, bags, fleece jackets, and thousands more, we all use plastics every day. The world produces about 882 billion pounds of plastic a year, and 80% of that is thrown “away” — meaning out of most people’s sight, whether in landfills and oceans, on roadsides and beaches, or tangled in the branches of trees and around the necks of waterfowl.

As plastics degrade into microplastics and nanoplastics, invisible to the naked eye, they fill the air, water, and soil. They’ve been shown to cause intestinal and liver damage.  A recent study by the Mayo Clinic links microplastics and nanoplastics found in plaques of human blood vessels to a potential increased risk of heart attack, stroke, or death.  Efforts are underway around the world to reduce the use of single use plastics and we all have a part to play in that.  It’s at least one thing we can commit to on this Earth Day. 

Copenhill

I could go on about the impending climate crisis, about how this past year was the hottest ever recorded, of how we in the US continue to burn fossil fuels at ever-increasing numbers, but wanted to end this piece on a more hopeful note.  A few years ago, I listened to Winona LaDuke excitedly talk about the future of hemp, how this renewable organic material could replace many oil and plastic-based textiles and building materials. Since then she’s gone on to develop a hemp farm in northern Minnesota that is doing just that.[iii] Projects highlighted in the recent PBS documentary, “ A Brief History of the Future,” are some of the most hopeful ideas turned into reality I’ve seen – from farming coral to replenish vanishing coral reefs, to successful efforts to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch[iv], to growing mycelium – the building blocks of mushrooms — to build almost anything, to the Copenhill in Copenhagen — the cleanest waste-to-energy power plant in the world designed as a green alpen skihill and so much more.  We have the way.  We just need the will.

That got me reflecting on the original Earth Day, when every member of Congress took the day to listen to constituents’ concerns about the environment.  I’m trying to imagine the current Congress doing such a thing.  What a radical act that would be these days where so many in Congress seem far more determined to stop any efforts that would reduce and prevent future harm to the environment, and in fact want to promote further expansion of the production and use of fossil fuels. (I’m still reeling over Trump removing all the solar panels from the White House that President Obama had installed.) But despite efforts to make it one, the fate of the earth is not a partisan issue.  It affects us all, especially those without a voice – the rivers, lakes, soils, fungi, flora, fauna, and generations yet unborn. So Congressional representatives truly listening to their constituencies about their concerns about the earth is a great idea, and the ones they should be listening to the most are young people, those most likely to inherit the consequences of my generation’s profligate squandering of the earth, air, water, plant and animal relatives, the climate, and their future. I still have great hope in Millennials, Gen Zers, and their children to turn this around.

The area where we pulled trash from the banks of the Cuyahoga on that first Earth Day is now a beautiful city park.  People picnic, hike, canoe, and kayak there.  The wildlife has returned, the plants flourish. Due to the Clean Water Act, the river supports fish, turtles, and frogs, and bald eagles have come back to nest.  The entire Cuyahoga River Valley, from Akron to Cleveland is now a national park.

We can do this, but it will take all of us – individuals, corporations, industries, agriculture, government.  Earth Day need not be, should not be limited to one day of the year.  Every day we live on this planet is Earth Day. May we take seriously the words of the Haudenosaunee Prayer of Thanksgiving which begins each day, “To our Mother the Earth, we send thanksgiving, love, and respect.  Now our minds are one.”[v]  May our minds, and our efforts, be one in this.

 

[i] Perfluoroalkyl substances.

[ii] Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act.

[iii] Winona’s Hemp & Heritage Farm.

[iv] The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a floating island of plastic debris estimated to be 625,000 square miles consisting of 45,000-129,000 metric tons of plastic – from fishing nets to water bottles and plastic bags to pens, lighters, toothbrushes, and baby bottles.  Whenever I’m picking up trash as I walk the beach along Lake Superior, I routinely find not only these items, but also straws, tampon applicators, dental floss picks (these seem especially ubiquitous since they also show up on inland trails), bottle caps, beverage container lids, Styrofoam, and more.

[v] Braiding Sweetgrass, 108.

On Listening

“Listen is such a little, ordinary word that it is easily passed over.  Yet we all know the pain of not being listened to, of not being heard.“ – Margaret Guenther

One of the main things I learned in all my time as a professor on a college campus was how isolated and alone the vast majority of students felt.  I learned it in my office when students would come to me needing someone to talk to, but I could also see it in the expressions on the faces of the hundreds of students I would pass walking through the halls.  It was the pain of not being listened to, of not being known.  In schools we expect students to participate, to learn how to communicate their ideas clearly, to present sound research in public forums, to critique each other – often in combative ways.  We teach how to speak, but not how to listen.  It seems the whole country is afflicted with this particular inability and its consequences.  We’ve learned how to shout at each other, but not to listen, and who ever shouts the loudest ‘wins,’ but it gets us nowhere in terms of creating the beloved community.

It was in a consciousness-raising (CR) group that I had my first lessons in how to listen. In the summer of 1980, my friend, Joyce, who was President of the local chapter of NOW, and I, along with a group of other women, trained with the state chapter of NOW in how to lead a CR group.  We used NOW’s “Guidebook for Consciousness-Raising Groups,” which laid out several rules for the groups, as well as several topics for exploration along with suggested questions.  The rules included steady attendance; beginning and ending on time; absolute confidentiality; speaking from one’s own truth and experience using “I” statements; no interrupting, confronting, arguing, questioning, calling for explanation or justification, eyebrow raising, eye rolling, or hostile glances; and finally, giving each woman undivided attention – one person speaks at a time and everyone listens -- no knitting, sewing, doodling, side conversations. All would sit in a circle, each woman speaking in turn about her experiences, feelings, thoughts, and perceptions, without interruption, confrontation, critique, or advice.  Honest self-disclosure was valued and encouraged, with a purpose to raise consciousness about one’s own and others’ lives, to recognize common ground, and to move from that to action against oppression.  When Joyce and I ran CR groups, we witnessed the power of truly being listened to, as well as the incredible privilege of being the one entrusted with listening.  I also learned how to listen to myself, for in that atmosphere, the truths of my own life that I had silenced were spoken.

“You heard me.  You heard me all the way.”  So goes the oft-quoted statement of one of the participants in a consciousness-raising group in which feminist theologian Nelle Morton participated.  It is a testimony to the power of what happens in CR groups – of hearing each other into speech. “When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.  Ideas actually begin to grow with us and come to life,” wrote Brenda Ueland, the first female journalist in Minneapolis.[i]  This was the blossoming born of CR groups, where women began to discover truths long buried and watch them unfold and come to life. 

The method employed in CR groups was important in helping women to find their voice in safe and respectful spaces, apart from the silencing they had so often experienced from men.  However, not everyone in these groups felt listened to.  “Are we being supportive and respectful if we hear but fail to listen to one another?” asked Lynet Uttal, who found the “polite nods” of support in Anglo feminist support groups (somewhat different from CR groups) to be silencing in a different way. She grew tired of polite nods that didn’t tell her if anyone was listening. As she wrote, “A polite nod does not incorporate ideas into an ongoing discussion. . . . No one is listening when they have no responses. . . . a question or response lets me know that someone is listening to me and working with me to understand. . . . I prefer the query which makes my comment a building block in the discussion.”[ii]

She was right that true listening – whether called “active” “deep,” “attentive,” or “holy” – also involves asking the right questions – questions that help the listener better to understand the one listened to, or to help them better to know themselves.  In her description of “deep listening,” Sister Simone Campbell asks, “’Am I responding in generosity?  Am I responding in selfishness? Am I responding in a way the builds up people around me, that builds me up, that is respectful of who I am?’”[iii]   Spiritual director, Diane Millis, also talks about the importance of asking the right questions, questions that will help the person discover things about themselves that they may not already have known or even wondered about. 

Learning to ask the right questions was an important aspect of my training to become a hospice volunteer.  As volunteers, one of our main roles was to be with the dying person and their caregivers in the final days and weeks of their lives. Our role was not to challenge, confront, or  argue with whatever the person needed and wanted to say, but rather to be a listening ear.  We were told to “leave ourselves at the door” -- to enter with no agenda, leaving our own worries, concerns, political and religious beliefs behind and to “meet them where they are.”  As Margaret Guenther put it so well, “I have to put myself out of the way, to become humble. . . I must be reverent, for I am entrusted with something precious and tender.”[iv]

We were being taught to give what Simone Weil called “loving attention.” As one of her commentators wrote, Weil believed that “we do not fully understand a fellow human being by staring, thinking, or even commiserating with her. Instead, understanding comes only when we let go of our self and allow the other to grab our full attention. In order for the reality of the other’s self to fully invest us, we must first divest ourselves of our own selves.”[v]  

We were taught to listen for the clues, the significances dropped into a conversation – a brief mention of a favorite moment with a friend, of a hobby they loved, of a special place, or treasured story. When we’d hear these clues, we were encouraged to pick them up, and in Ueland’s suggested phrase, ask them to “tell me more.”  This listening often brought a light, a release, a peace to their last days, a chance to share those things most important to them in those precious days. One of my favorite moments was when I spent time volunteering in a male hospice ward in England, where the staff – who’d never heard of a hospice volunteer – were a bit skeptical of my role.  Most of the men there had been in World War I, and one of the things that surfaced as one of them spoke to me was a song from that time.  As he began to sing it, the others joined in.  Soon the whole ward was alive with song.  It was a glorious moment of life among the dying.  (The staff were a bit amazed. They’ve since instituted a volunteer program of their own.)

“Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force,” wrote Ueland, “ . . . the friends that really listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their radius as though it did us good, like ultraviolet trays.”[vi] One of those friends toward whom I moved was well-known for her ability to listen.  Her husband even once told me that he married her because of how well she listened and the kinds of questions she would ask.  Not only did she listen to me, she taught me how to listen to others by her example, following up on those dropped hints and drawing a person out.  Usually I am the one listening, too, but I’m also fortunate in my life to have a handful of friends over the years who truly offer me the gift of listening, whether in person, over the phone, through emails or letters.  The experience of that is akin to what Adrienne Rich wrote in her “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev,” “I have never seen my own forces so taken up and shared and given back.”[vii] Such listening is clarifying, affirming, revealing – both allowing me to speak my own truths and to discover new possibilities.  It is a listening that lets the person know that you care, that invites intimacy and trust, that feeds a longing to be known. 

Sometimes the question to be asked is simply a sincere, “How are you?’ and being open to the answer. As the authors of Women’s Ways of Knowing found in their study of maternal listening, “It is through attentive love, the ability to ask, ‘What are you going through? And the ability to hear the answer that the reality of the child is both created and respected.’” As my son was growing up, I picked up a copy of How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk. The book began with some of the most important wisdom I’ve gained about listening – first, to meet the person – in this case, the child -- where they are on an emotional level, rather than dismissing, denying, ignoring, suggesting a different emotion, or launching into a critique or advice. The authors offered these steps – 1) listen with full attention – turn off the tv, put away the phone, directly face your child and show them that they have your full attention; 2) instead of questions or advice, acknowledge with a word; 3) instead of denying the feeling, give the feeling a name; 4) instead of explanation, give the child their wishes in fantasy. As they said, what people of all ages need in a moment of distress is not agreement or disagreement; they need someone to recognize what they are experiencing.  In other words, they need to be listened to and acknowledged.  We all do.

And sometimes the question to be asked is, what do I need to learn from you?  This is the wisdom I learned from Father Thomas Keating who taught Centering Prayer.  All the prayer I’d been exposed to as a child and young adult was about “talking” -- “saying” your prayers – whether the reciting of The Lord’s Prayer, or other scripted prayers in worship services, or the speaking of prayers of confession, or saying intercessory prayers -- lifting up one’s concerns, needs, wants to a listening divine, or simply saying grace before a meal. But Centering Prayer is different.  Rather than speaking, it is about listening – listening for the voice, wisdom, and guidance of the divine.  This is how I mostly understand prayer now – a quieting of one’s own inner dialogue in order to listen to a greater wisdom.

Catholic priest and theologian Henri Nouwen considered nature to be “God’s first language,” and sought spiritual guidance by “letting nature speak.” Robin Wall Kimmerer describes so well the importance of listening to the wisdom of nature: “I come here to listen, to nestle in the curve of the roots in a soft hollow of pine needles, to lean my bones against the column of white pines, to turn off the voice in my head until I can hear the voices outside it:  the shhh of wind in needles, water trickling over rock,  . . . and something more  . . . the wordless being of others in which we are never alone.”[viii] It is perhaps the most important listening we can do, a humbling of ourselves amidst the loud and often arrogant voices of humanity. As Nouwen said, “Only when we make a deep bow to the rivers, hills, and mountains that offer us a home – only then can they become transparent and reveal to us their real meaning.  All of nature conceals great secrets that cannot be revealed if do not listen carefully and patiently.”[ix] 

Sometimes it seems that the earth is also feeling the pain of not being listened to, as much as if not more than what I witnessed in the faces of young people. The common theme in all of these ways of listening is presence – the paying of full loving attention.  May we take the time to put away our cellphones, our earbuds, our muzak, our busy lives, our need for constant chatter and background noise and truly to listen – to the earth, to our children, to each other, and to the wise voice from within.   

Sources

Belenky, Mary Field et. al. Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1986.

Faber, Adele and Elaine Mazlish. How To Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk. New York: Avon Books, 1980.

Guenther, Margaret. Holy Listening: The Art of Spiritual Direction. Lanham, MD: A Cowley Publications Book, 1992.  

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

Nouwen, Henri. Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life. With Michael J. Christensen and Rebecca Laird. New York: Harper One, 2015.

Rich, Adrienne. The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977.  New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978.                                                    

Tippett, Krista. Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living.  New York: Penguin, 2016.

Ueland, Brenda. Strength to Your Sword Arm: Selected Writings:  Duluth, Minnesota: Holy Cow! Press, 1993.

Uttal, Lynet. “Nods That Silence.” In Anzaldúa, Gloria. ed. Making Face, Making Soul/Hacienda Caras/Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990. 317-320.

Zaretsky, Robert, “Simone Weil’s Concept of Radical Attention.” Literary Hub.  March 9, 2021. University of Chicago. Simone Weil’s Radical Conception of Attention ‹ Literary Hub (lithub.com)   – from The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas. University of Chicago Press, 2021.

 [i] Ueland, 205.

[ii] Uttal, 317 & 319.

[iii] Quoted in Tippett, 130.

[iv] Guenther, 145.

[v] Zaretsky.

[vi] Ueland, 205.

[vii] Rich, 5.

[viii] Kimmerer, 49.

[ix] Nouwen, 58.

Becoming Grandma: One Year Later

Was it just a year ago I first held you in my arms, looked into your eyes, and said, “Who are you?” We’ve spent the past year getting to know each other.   How quickly you’ve grown from that sweet little babe who fell into such a deep and peaceful sleep in my arms to the active little boy who is constantly on the move.  Wasn’t it just a few months ago that we clapped as you began to learn how to roll over, first from your back to your front and then front to back?  And just a few weeks ago that you first started to crawl, and then stand?  Now you are walking everywhere.

You are an intrepid explorer and the world your obstacle course – wherever there’s a hole to crawl through or a height to surmount – from the couch to grandpa to the oh-so-inviting stairs to the top of the piano and beyond – you’ll be there. You started climbing even before you started walking.  It’s just the same as crawling after all, only vertical.

You have been captivated by how different things feel – from the softness of Cake’s fur to the scratchiness of the window screens, the bumpiness of the place mats, the smoothness of the window pane, the metallic ridges of the heat vents, the plastic mesh on the gate, the gooiness of squashed oatmeal, the splashy wet of water, the scratchiness of sand, and the silkiness of a blade of grass.  Your fingers explore it all. 

Sometimes I wonder if it’s the feel of the things that fascinate you or the sound, because you seem to be listening as you run your fingers over everything. You were the most vocal infant I’ve ever met, trying out every possible sound from high pitched squeals to Germanic glottal stops and everything in between.  You were delighted when you could make the sound of hands clapping, and then the sounds of anything you could pick up and clap together -- from plastic cups to maracas to toy cymbals. The shaker egg was the best!  And the piano. At first you were delighted by the sounds you could make by pressing multiple keys at once with your flat hand, but you also wanted to experiment with the differences in the notes – going first to the highest notes and then the lowest.  Now you want to hear each note individually, gently depressing one key at a time, listening for the various pitches and timbres. When you were only a few months old you began to sing yourself to sleep – those little murmuring coos and oos that soothe you --  so familiar to me now, and so precious.


You are so very curious about how things work – from the window cranks to drawer knobs to the springy door stops — how you loved to watch them go “boing” when you touched them — and even sometimes your toys! My favorite moment of your exploration was when you watched the hammers on the piano go up and down and put your hands in the piano as far as they could go to feel the vibrations on the strings when I played the notes. 

We love to watch you, but you also love to watch us!  You were so intrigued when your grandpa got out his screwdriver and tuning tools to fix the notes on the piano and the latch on the door.  And you are content to sit in your high chair just to watch me make a pie, chop vegetables, or wash the dishes. 

You love the dogs and cats best of all – far preferring their toys to your own, watching their every movement and so wanting to touch them before they scoot away from your fur-pulling grasp.  Your first words were “doggie” and “kitty,” and when we go walking, you point at every passing Golden, Labrador, Great Dane, German Shepherd, Terrier, Corgi, and Pug and excitedly say, “doggie”! Sometimes I think you think you are a dog! 

We have had so many precious moments, you and I – swinging and singing to you in the old hammock by the lake, the surprise  -- to both of us – of your first laugh, chasing you up and down the halls when you learned to crawl,  your first encounter with solid food, the zest with which you eat everything offered,  and your sheer amazement at the wonder of pureed carrots, your absolute glee zooming around the bathtub, you falling asleep in my arms as I sang “Away in a Manger” and “Silent Night” on Christmas Eve, your precious giggles as we play peek-a-boo when I duck under the kitchen counter and around the walls, your first tentative steps, the way you smile and reach for me when we first see each other when I come to visit, the sweet early mornings when I get to be the one you wake up to and you are still snuggly and not quite ready to wriggle out of my arms, and I sing our good morning song that always makes you smile.

A year ago I wondered what kind of grandma I would be.  Now I know – one who knows what makes you smile and laugh as well as how to soothe your tears, who delights in your curiosity and loves watching you explore the world,  who sings your favorite songs and plays games that make you giggle, who downloaded Raffi into her iPhone only to discover that you really love “Emma’s Revolution”—though you do like Raffi, too, who cherishes those middle-of-the night wake-ups when I get to be the one to rock you back to sleep.  I sing all the time when I’m with you – because it makes you happy and because being with you makes me so happy. A few months ago, I caught myself waving to you across the kitchen, singing and playing games that made you laugh, and for a moment I had a flash of recognition — a memory of my mother with her grandchild. It made me smile.  

I also know that I’m the kind of grandma who has wanted to make the world better for you, for all future generations, and I have worried about the world you have been born into.  A year ago, I wrote of how the Dagara people believe that children come into this world bearing wisdom from the cosmos, and it is the role of grandparents to learn all they have to share.  What news did you bring?  The news that every new life brings – that we come into this world with such a desire to learn and to grow, such curiosity and eagerness, such capacity for love and joy and for a wonder that will help us grow into caring and compassionate people with reverence for the earth if we can but keep this capacity alive. And so, I cannot give into despair, for you have come to remind us – that “a deeply felt connection to all beings in the web of life . . . love of this life, this earth, the joy we know in ourselves and other beings is enough. . . “ to keep us working toward preserving and enhancing that life for all.

I also wrote that a grandparent’s role is “to feel and cherish [the child’s] beauty. . . . fall in love with this magnificent creature . . . celebrate its splendor.”  But I think you have also come to teach us that it is not solely my role toward you – which has been the easiest task in the world – but the role of each of us toward every child, every new being — toward all beings.  

Thank you for sharing this first precious year of your life with me, dear Martin.  I look forward to the next! 

Sources Quoted

Christ, Carol P. 1989. “Rethinking Theology and Nature.” In Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. ed. Judith Plaskow & Carol P. Christ. New York: HarperOne, 323. 

Swimme, Brian. The Universe Is a Green Dragon: A Cosmic Creation Story. Santa Fe: Bear & Company, 1985, 32.

 

 

 

 

Neyaashi*

-- *meaning “long, narrow point”

I fell in love with the 7-mile long, thin stretch of land that creates the Duluth harbor from the moment I first found it, soon after moving to Duluth in 1980.  Here my dogs, who’d come from farm country into the city, could finally run free.  They loved running up and down the beach and swimming out to fetch driftwood sticks we’d throw into the lake.  I, too, loved running barefoot on the sand and jumping into the clear, cold waters of Superior.  In the early mornings, I often found myself the only one on the beach, which amazed me in this city of nearly 90,000.

I’ve had wonderful times swimming, playing, and picnicking there. And in the time before fires on the Point were banned, in the evenings we’d sit around driftwood fires and watch the stars come out.

In the winter, huge ice cliffs form along the shore, built up for months by the crashing waves.

At the far end of the point grows a large pine forest – home to the eagles that nest in the tall pines, as well as the occasional fox.  A trail through the forest leads past the old, original lighthouse and then on to the shipping canal between Minnesota and Wisconsin. 

I also have loved the quirky mix of old and new houses that give such character to the Park Point neighborhood, known for its close-knit community with its annual rummage sale and art fair and its concern for the fragile beach ecosystem and the surrounding waters. 

Lately this has begun to change.  A motel was built on the Point just past the Lift Bridge, and more and more homes were bought up and turned into McMansions, Air BnB’s, and other vacation rentals.  Then came Kathy Cargill, married to one of the heirs of the Cargill fortune.[i] Over the past several months, through her North Shore LS LLC, Cargill has bought up more than a dozen homes on the Point for two to three times their market value, and then razed them and all the surrounding trees and vegetation to the ground. In December, Cargill told the Duluth News Tribune that the demolished houses were "pieces of crap" that she couldn't imagine living in.[ii]  Cargill refused to answer multiple queries about her intent for the properties, causing quite a bit of concern among Duluth residents, who feared that they might be planning “to turn an entire neighborhood full of public parks and public beaches into some sort of weird gated community for future billionaires to ride out the coming climate crisis in [so-called] "Climate-Proof Duluth",”[iii] closing access to the beach and changing the nature of the community into a mini-Minnetonka (home to the Cargill Corporation) where the median income necessary to purchase a single-family home is $500,000. 

It wouldn’t be the first or the last time something like that has happened.  Decades ago, the wealthy Dayton family purchased acres of prime Lake Superior shoreline just north of Two Harbors near the Encampment River, gating off public access to the lake there. The billionaire Uhilein family, owners of the Uline packaging supply company, bought up most of the town of Manitowosh Waters, Wisconsin where they spent millions remaking the small community in the image they preferred.  I’ve witnessed the same in the quaint, small village on the lake in Michigan where I spent summers as a child, when former defense contractor, Jonathan L. Borisch and his son, Matt, bought up most of the property in the town, demolished most of the buildings, and built restaurants, retail stores, a high-end grocery store, and condominiums, luring the wealthy to the area where one-by-one they are tearing down old cabins and putting up McMansions, pricing long-time residents out of their homes.

Kathy Cargill finally broke her silence a few days ago, telling the Wall Street Journal that she planned to “beautify” the area, build homes for some relatives, open a coffee shop, fund “improvements” to city parkland as well as a sports facility. However, faced with growing concern and criticism from the residents and the city government, she had changed her mind. Calling the citizens of Duluth “small-minded,” she stated, "’The good plans that I have down there for beautifying, updating and fixing up Park Point  . . .  forget it.”[iv]

Perhaps Kathy Cargill had only the best intentions for the land she has bought up on Park Point. It is rumored that, like her now deceased mother-in-law, she may have been talking with the Nature Conservancy about some of the land. A friend whose knowledge and perspective I deeply respect has assured me that Ms. Cargill, who spent much of her life working for the Wisconsin DNR, has been a life-long environmentalist, and is relatively new to wealth, having married James Cargill after he lost his first wife to cancer in 2010.  But as I’ve watched this saga unfold and witnessed the devastation on Park Point, I couldn’t help but see the parallels between Cargill’s behavior and the attitude and practices of the Cargill corporation around the world.  Minnesota-based Cargill, the largest privately-owned corporation in the world and the primary purchaser and distributor of grain throughout the world, has a reputation for secretiveness, deforestation, and forcing its agricultural model and practices on those which it considers “undeveloped.” As former Congressman Henry Waxman has said, “Throughout its history, Cargill has exhibited a disturbing and repetitive pattern of deception and destruction.”[v] Indeed, it would be rather ironic if the Cargill family were seeking to build a climate refuge for themselves in Duluth, since the Cargill corporation, through their practices of deforestation, has been one of the largest contributors to climate change worldwide.

In 1998, Cargill was instrumental in creating the World Bank’s structural adjustment policies that forced India and other countries in the global South to open up their seed sector to global corporations, forcing farmers to use corporate seeds, which need fertilizers, pesticides, and cannot be saved, rather than indigenous farm-saved seeds, shifting a biodiverse region to a monoculture. According to ecofeminist Vandana Shiva, “The WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture, which paved the way for the imposition of cash crops, should be called the Cargill Agreement.  It was former Cargill vice president Dan Amstutz who drafted the original text of the agreement  . . . The primary aim of Cargill, and hence the Agreement on Agriculture, is to open Southern markets and convert peasant agriculture to corporate agriculture.”[vi] She continues, “Over the past few decades, food production, processing, and distribution has shifted out of the hands of women, small farmers, and small producers and is being monopolized by global corporate giants such as Cargill, Monsanto, Phillip Morris, and Nestlé. Small producers everywhere are being displaced and uprooted by the unfair competition from heavily subsidized agribusiness.”[vii] Indeed, Cargill is the largest of the five “Merchants of Grain,”[viii] who control much of the world’s food supply, and is also one of the main suppliers of beef, chocolate, and palm oil in the world. 

In 2017, the global advocacy organization Mighty Earth dubbed Cargill “the worst company in the world” for its ongoing devastation of the Amazon rainforest to plant soy to be used for animal feed, and for its deforestation in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire for cocoa plantations and in Southeast Asia for palm oil plantations.  In so doing, they have devastated indigenous peoples who have been forced to give up their lands and their traditional ways of life, and have suffered the loss of their livelihoods and well-being with skyrocketing rates of cancer and miscarriages due to herbicides and pesticides used to deforest and to grow monocrops.  They have also been implicated in human rights abuses and child slave labor.

We have all been complicit, knowingly or unknowingly.  If you’ve ever eaten a McDonald’s hamburger or Chicken McNuggets, a Nestlé chocolate bar, or Twizzlers, or food from a restaurant, hospital, or university, you’ve probably purchased food made from grain, soy, beef, chicken, cocoa, or palm oil produced and distributed by Cargill.[ix] 

Undoubtedly Cargill has also used its wealth for good, helping to fund such public enterprises as PBS, the American Red Cross, and the Nature Conservancy, as well as private educational institutions, such as their funding the new sustainability project at the College of St. Scholastica. Mighty Earth has admitted that, “under pressure, Cargill has reformed its practices in many areas — which shows that it can change when it wants to. But contrary to its view of itself as a leader, it usually comes in dead last.” In 2014, Cargill gave its support to the New York Declaration on reducing global deforestation and has presented itself publicly as being committed to sustainability, but Cargill has failed to follow through on its promises. They changed the original deadline they set for themselves of ending their deforestation practices from 2020 to 2030, though they recently shortened that timeline to 2025.  However, questions remain whether it is too little, too late, and people on the ground in Brazil say that they have seen little sign of change.[x]

As I, a white settler, write this, I am fully cognizant that this is not the first time that the way of life and ecosystem of Park Point have been threatened. Just as Cargill has displaced and imposed its way of life and what it considers “improvements” on indigenous peoples around the world, and now, perhaps, on the local residents of Park Point, so did white settlers of the area do the same to the indigenous Anishinaabe people here. Prior to white settlement of the area in the early to mid 1800s, the Point was home to indigenous peoples, who set up camps along the shoreline in the summer, and had sacred sites and burial grounds and later a trading post on the Point. Burial grounds have been found just west of the old lighthouse in the forest, as well as other sites on the Point.

Not only did white settlers displace the indigenous people and their lifeways, they changed the literal landscape of the Point. What is now known as Park Point was then known as Neyaashi, meaning “long narrow point,” since at that time it was an intact natural sandbar peninsula, the narrowest part of which was a short portage trail connecting what is now known as St. Louis Bay to Lake Superior, or Gichigami – hence the Anishinaabe name for Duluth, Onigamiinsing, meaning “little portage.”  In 1870, the Duluth Commons (City) Council voted to cut, dredge, and build a ship canal through the portage, making what was once a sandbar, an island. 

In 1895, an article in the Superior Evening Telegram claimed that “It will not be a great many years before the Chippewa Indian of the Northwest will be a thing of the past,”[xi] but as so many Anishinaabe people have said to me, “We’re still here.”  One of those interviewed for the 2015 ethnographic study of the contributions of the Anishinaabe to the city of Duluth said: “I guess it’s part of sustainability of who we are in the context of history in this region, because if we allow things to go unchecked and unchallenged the way they are, that’s what you call cultural genocide, and … the European descent will completely obliterate any kind of notion that there’s indigenous peoples here. We’re still alive, we’re still here, we’re the spiritual keepers of this land, . . . .”[xii]

In that same spirit, the residents of Park Point and Duluth in general are challenging what they fear may be another kind of cultural genocide.  Far from being “small-minded,” many, hopefully most, are large-minded in recognizing and respecting the unique ecosystem and the spiritual power of the lake and surrounding lands and wish to preserve them. It would be good that the local Anishinaabe people, who have had such a strong impact on the nature of this community, lead the way. One of the local indigenous people interviewed for the 2015 report stated that certain sites on Minnesota Point should be considered sacred or eligible for the criteria of the National Register of Historic Places as “Traditional Cultural Properties,” meaning places of traditional cultural importance to particular communities.  Certainly Neyaashi is such a sacred place – one not to be desecrated -- a place not only of cultural importance, but of ecological and deep spiritual significance. In that spirit, it is my hope that the land, the lake, the forest and its creatures will continue to be cared for and flourish.

ADDENDUM : After I finished this piece, I found myself wanting to add one more thought.  Despite whatever good intentions Kathy Cargill may have had in her plans for Park Point, I find her method of going about this to be arrogating. If she indeed wanted to do something for the people of Park Point, a more appropriate way to go about this would have been to ask residents, as well as the citizens of Duluth in general, particularly the indigenous population, what they needed, wanted, and would find useful, rather than assume and impose her own vision.  I found myself reminded of Paulo Freire’s wisdom in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed,  critiquing the methods of those who impose their own agendas rather than ask.  As he wrote: “They see themselves as ‘promotors’ of the people. Their programs of action . . . include their own objectives, their own convictions, and their own preoccupations.  They do not listen to the people, . . . it seems absurd to consider the necessity of respecting the ‘view of the world’ held by the people. . . . They regard as equally absurd that one must necessarily consult the people. . . .” (136-137) Rather, he suggests dialogue as a more appropriate, liberating approach.  “Founding itself upon love, humility, and faith, dialogue becomes a horizontal relationship of which mutual trust between the dialoguers is the logical consequence. . . . trust is established in dialogue.”  How much better the outcome of all this would have been if such dialogue had been entered into.  (Source: Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 20th anniversary ed. New York: Continuum, 1993.)

[i] The Cargill family is the 4th wealthiest family in the country, with an estimated net worth of $60.6 billion.

[ii] Billionaire has bought, demolished 7 Park Point homes in last year - Duluth News Tribune | News, weather, and sports from Duluth, Minnesota

[iii] Brooks: Billionaire pees in Duluth’s Cheerios (startribune.com) 

[iv] Kathy Cargill finally reveals her plan for Duluth's Park Point and the reason she’s scrapping it (startribune.com)

[v] Cargill: The Worst Company in the World (mightyearth.org).  Mighty Earth is not alone.  Rain Forest Network, Greenpeace, and several corporations also have called out Cargill for their deforestation practices.

[vi] Shiva, Earth Democracy, 35.

[vii] Ibid., 161.

[viii] The original six were Cargill, Continental, Louis Dreyfus, Bunge, Mitsui Cok, and Andre& Co..  Cargill bought out the second-largest, Continental. ADM and Glencore and COFCO International have since replaced Mitsui Cok and Andre. See also Dan Morgan’s Merchants of Grain: The Power and Profits of the Five Giant Companies at the Center of the World’s Food Supply and Jonathon Kingsman’s The New Merchants of Grain: Out of the Shadows.

[ix] McDonald’s and Burger King are among Cargill’s main customers, as is Sysco, which supplies a large majority of  food to restaurants, hospitals, universities, hotels, and more.

[x] Cargill shortens timeline to end deforestation in Brazil. Is it enough? (startribune.com)

[xi] Quoted in “An Ethnographic Study of Indigenous Contributions to the City of Duluth.” “Chippewa” is the Anglicized name settlers gave to the Anishinaabe people.

[xii] Ibid.

On Friendship

I’ve been fortunate in my life to have friends, to be a friend, though I’ve also had periods of drought without the nourishing stream of friendship in my life. I’ve had friends who were my family, and family who were friends. Until my 30s my friends were mostly my own age, but then I discovered the wonder of friends older than myself, and as I grew older – younger than myself.  I have long-lived friendships with the depth that comes from knowing each other over time, and some that came later in life – with the delighted surprise of discovering a now close friend at a time when I thought my time of making new friends was over. (Of course, the friendship of dogs has also been very important in my life, but that’s another story for another day.) Each friendship is unique, making writing about friendship particularly challenging.  The nature of my friendships have changed over time – with friends in childhood being primarily playmates, in adolescence – friends traveling in packs – gangs of girls; in grad school — my colleagues. Then I found feminism and the world of female friendship opened in deep and rich ways.

It is the most mysterious of connections.  Friends.  How is it that some people attract us, some don’t?  How is it that we can begin a conversation with a stranger that grows into a deep and long-lasting friendship and with others the talk quickly becomes flat and lifeless?  How is that some come into our lives for a time and then fade away, and others last a lifetime? 

A recent Oxford study, in which participants had their brains scanned while watching a variety of videos, found that people who become close friends are literally on the same wavelength. Particularly in the areas of the brain that light up when we find things rewarding or that gain our attention, people whose brain waves were most similar were the closest of friends, even factoring in variables of age, gender, ethnicity, and nationality.

But how do we find each other? A survey research project I did in college revealed that the main determinant as to why people in college were friends was proximity.  Who they lived with or near was the most important factor in choosing friends. That’s been borne out in my life. As a child, my friends were mostly ones whose houses I could walk to, and later, bike to.  At the cabin where I spent my summers, the group of us who were friends all lived within walking or canoeing distance from each other – the Wildwood Harbor gang. At work, friendships developed with people who had offices near mine. In my life, some of my dearest friendships began as neighbors. Even the grassroots feminist organizations in Duluth thrived in part due to the smaller size of the city enabling the proximity of people and organizations to each other that allowed for conversation, collaboration, cross-cultivation, and friendship.

I’ve also found friends in community -- work, school, church, kids’ activities, volunteer activities, feminist organizations, marches, and protests; gathering places, as well as the dog walking community that has grown as we walk the same trails, and now the online transplant and FAR (feminismandreligion.com blog) communities. 

Community, proximity, being on the same wavelength – these account for our meeting, for our resonance.  But what makes for good friends?  After years of isolation due to illness, I felt awkward and needy and didn’t really know anymore how to find friends, be a friend. Then I discovered feminism.  I bonded with people with whom I shared a passion, a cause, and the work to bring our vision into being.  We gathered in consciousness-raising groups where, in Nelle Morton’s phrase, we heard each other into speech.  We helped each other discover ourselves by sharing our truths out loud – without criticism, argument, interruption, advice – simply being heard.  The self-discovery in sharing the truths we had not even been willing to tell ourselves was powerful.  Most importantly for me was the feminist theorists I was reading – Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Susan Griffin – who challenged me to be my authentic self, honest, open, no longer hiding behind the façade of being someone I thought others wanted me to be – but myself.[i]  

Feminism takes friendship seriously, and I’ve thought often, and written about,[ii] what the requisites of being a good friend are, and wanted to take this opportunity to examine these again.

1) Love.  Friend – from the Old English, Old German, and Old Dutch priy-ont  (hence the strange spelling  --  fr- I - end --  rather than simply “frend”)  -- meaning  “to love. Certainly, the first and foremost requirement of friendship is love.  And I mean by this not feelings of affection, though certainly that is a part of love, but rather as bell hooks said – love as a verb, as an action which, as hooks enumerated, includes not only affection, but also care, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, and honest and open communication. 

For me, one of the most important aspects of love as a verb is what Simone Weil described as “intense, pure, disinterested, gratuitous, generous attention”(333). Attention -- from the Latin ad – meaning “toward,” and tendre – meaning “to stretch.” To stretch toward. The image coming to mind is of those times I can’t quite hear what someone is saying and I lean in closer, carefully observe their face, their mouth, and their body movements.

Examining each of Weil’s descriptors takes us closer to its meaning.  First, intense – coincidentally also derived from the word tendre – “to stretch.”  It is to lean in even closer, not to miss a thing, the fine details, the dropped clue, the tear or slight smile that tell us so much. Pure --with the only motive being one of knowing and caring – not to sway or advise or correct or manipulate. Disinterested – far from “uninterested” – disinterested is to give attention without bringing one’s own interests to the conversation, to gain nothing but understanding and knowledge of the other person. And as Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman made clear, in friendship the desire to gain knowledge is not out of self-interest -- better to dominate or for self-growth, or out of duty, or for research, but as Weil said, pure. Gratuitous – completely voluntary. I give you attention because I want to, because I care, because you are my friend. Finally, generous – liberal in the giving of one’s time, and friendship does require time. To give attentive loving is to be fully present to another, without our own interests, fears, projections, agendas getting in the way, and without concern for time.

2) Reciprocity. Reciprocity is the give and take of friendship – that as much as we want to know we also want to be known. If only one is providing attentive love and not the other, then it’s not friendship, but a different kind of relationship – a counselor perhaps, or the relationship of parent to child, or teacher to student. As Lugones and Spelman wrote, “If you enter the task out of friendship with us, then you will be moved to attain the appropriate reciprocity of care for your and our well-being as whole beings, .. . [and] to satisfy the need for reciprocity of understanding that will enable you to follow us in our experiences as we are able to follow you in yours” (24). We need balance in friendships – an evenness in what we give and receive, or the relationship will start to feel lopsided. No one’s keeping score. If we were, it would stop being a friendship but rather more of a transaction.  Nor in friendship do our gifts of time, attention, objects of affection come with the expectation of being repaid in kind. Reciprocity is not the motive of friendship, but rather the mode – a recognition of mutuality and of being equally invested in the friendship.

3) Honor and Trust. In friendship, we entrust to each other our hearts and minds, our sanity, our sense of the world – our very beings.  At best, we can achieve in our friendships what Adrienne Rich called an “honorable relationship” – “a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.”  This is important, she wrote, “because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation, . . . because in so doing we do justice to our own complexity, . . and because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us” (188).  We cannot love what we do not know.  Knowledge makes love possible.  Love requires both the honest sharing of our truths and the desire to know and accept deeply all that is.  In truth-telling and compassionate listening, friendship is made possible.

4) World-traveling. Maria Lugones’s prescription for truly knowing and loving another is to travel with them to those places where they are most at home, most playful, most at ease.  How different people can be in those places where they are most at home.  This may mean knowing them in their homes, meeting their families, or literally traveling to their countries, knowing them in what may be cultures and languages different from our own. This has been especially important for me as I’ve sought friendship with those whose identities are different from mine – the lesbian community in the ‘80s, the indigenous community. It has been a vital part of my friendships to travel and be with my friends, and create friendships, in those places where they thrive, find meaning, and are most fully themselves.

5) Commitment. To be a friend is to commit to all the other elements – to care, attention, honesty, investment in their worlds, and time.  It may mean making a commitment to check in every day, once a week, or once a year, to make the time to keep the connection meaningful.  It means being there for your friend -- in times of need, as best you as you are able, and may sometimes mean dropping everything when the need is great, or in times of great joy and celebration.

6) Reconciliation.  Friends can and do hurt each other.  Part of commitment to a friendship is to stay in relation to do the work of reconciliation -- that each do what one can, in bell hooks’ words, “to restore to harmony that which has been broken, severed, and disrupted. . . . We can come together with those who have hurt us, with those whom we have caused pain” (Sisters 163). Sara Ruddick has written that reconciliation requires that we name and own the harm perpetrated, that each take responsibility for their part in it, and then and only then, to forgive appropriately – allowing each to “start over again on an equal footing, no longer separated by whatever wrong occurred” (hooks, Sisters, 173). As Carter Heyward wrote so passionately, “I care about us, whether or not I ‘feel good’ about us right now, and I do not want to leave you comfortless and without strength. . . . If I love you, I will struggle for myself/us.  . . to do what is just, to make right our relation” (296).

7) Loyalty. I am wary, skeptical of a certain kind of loyalty that requires one to be disloyal to oneself, to act against one’s integrity.  I don’t believe a true friend would ask that of another.  But I do believe in a loyalty, a faithfulness to our friend’s well-being, to be someone they can count on – whether to have their back, to keep one’s promises to them, or to keep their confidences.  It means, as Lugones and Spelman said, “having a stake in our world” – to act in ways that are supportive of their individual and collective well-being.  And sometimes, it simply means showing up.

8) Fun and play. As children, friendship was almost entirely about playing together – whether games, tag, hide and seek, make-believe, dolls, dress-up, riding bikes, going swimming, sledding, or skating. As we grow up, friendships get more serious along with life – talking, supporting, sharing meals. But it’s important that we not forget to play and laugh together. Lugones advocated world-traveling as a way to know our friends where they are most playful. Such play, she wrote, is not the agonistic play of winning, losing, battling, keeping score, but rather being open to surprise, to self-construction, and, unworried about competence and following the rules, simply being open to being silly and having fun.

Feminist organizations in this town thrived for so many years because they regularly took time to play together.  Especially in the serious and often traumatic work they were engaged in, it was vital to their well-being that they took time away just for fun – whether to go camping, hiking, playing poker, or singing songs around a campfire.  En-joying each other was vital. 

One of my favorite ways to play with friends as an adult has been playing music together. Playing duets with friends often has resulted in us collapsing in laughter.[i] It was never about perfection, just about the fun, and being able to laugh at our mistakes. The two, then three of us, who regularly made music together for forty years are bonded through song.  Our best times weren’t the concerts but rather the rehearsals. I’ve never laughed so hard and so long as we did in rehearsals. 

Then there’s just being kids again.  In our seventies, the best times my friend and I have had together have been getting out the snowtube and saucer and sliding down snowy hillsides – laughing all the way. 

9) Finally, graciousness. As I’ve grown older, being gracious with my friends has become more important and more possible.  For me that means understanding their limitations, abilities, capacities and incapacities, knowing their quirks, their likes and dislikes, their routines, commitments, their lives — accepting that I may go weeks, months, years without hearing from them – and then, with gratitude, begin again right where we left off, always trusting that they are doing the best they can. I’m sure I have been given the grace of friends more times than I know.

…

As with all love, there is loss.  I’ve lost friends to distance, to growing apart, to dementia, and for reasons unknown. Each loss takes a toll – a missing camaraderie, companionship, or trusted confidante.  As I’ve grown older, more and more I’ve lost friends to death.  It’s a loss that’s rarely acknowledged, but that cuts deep. I’ve known and been known by each friend in unique ways. With each loss, that is gone forever, and a bit of light is lost from my world. Marge Piercy describes the pain of this so well -- “When a friend dies  .  . . a hunger sucks at the mind for gone color . . . / a hunger drains the day  . . . / a red giant gone nova, an empty place in the sky . . . .” (5).

In my hospice training we were told that death doesn’t end a relationship, just changes it. In ways I’ve found this to be true, in other ways not. Yet, years before my friend, Joan, died, she wrote to me, “I’ll always love you through this life, and after my death. J.” Her card sits on my bookshelf where I see it every day, and then I feel her love – still here, as she promised, after her death.

. . .

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.

[i] It’s been found that the principal function of laughter, evolutionarily speaking, is to create and deepen social bonds, and nothing seems to bring my friends and I together so much as good, raucous laughter.

 Sources

Bartlett, Elizabeth Ann. 2016. Making Waves: Grassroots Feminism in Duluth and Superior. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press.

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

Best Friends Really Do Share Brain Patterns, Neuroscientists Reveal (inverse.com)

Griffin, Susan. 1982. Made from this Earth: An Anthology of Writings by Susan Griffin. New York: Harper & Row.

Heyward, Carter. 1989. “Sexuality, Love, and Justice.” In Plaskow, Judith and Carol P. Christ, eds. Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancsco. 293-301.

hooks, bell. 2000. All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow & Co.

______. 1993.  Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-recovery. Boston: South End Press.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde.  Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984.

 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.

 Lugones, Maria. C. and Elizabeth V. Spelman. 2013. “Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism and the Demand for ‘The Woman’s Voice.’” In Kolmar, Wendy K. and Frances Bartkowski, eds. Feminist Theory: A Reader. 4th edition. New York: McGraw Hill. 17-24.

 Morton, Nelle. 1985. The Journey Is Home. Boston: Beacon.

 Piercy, Marge. 1981. The Moon Is Always Female. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

 Rich, Adrienne. 1979. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

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

The evolutionary origins of laughter are rooted more in survival than enjoyment (theconversation.com)

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

You Share Everything With Your Bestie. Even Brain Waves. - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

[i] Of particular importance to me in this were Adrienne Rich’s, “On Women and Honor,” in her On Lies, Secrets, and Silence; Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” and “The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action,” in her Sister Outsider,  and Susan Griffin’s “The Way of All Ideology,” in her Made from this Earth.

[ii] See my chapter on friendship in my Rebellious Feminism.

I Carry Your Heart

I carry your heart with me (I carry it in

my heart) I am never without it (anywhere)

I go you go. . .

I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)

-    e.e. cummings

 

 .  . . being reflections on the 30th anniversary of my heart transplant. . .

 

Driving north on I-35 after having just left a powerful Somatic Experiencing® training session in which I relived significant moments of my heart transplantation, tears streamed down my face as I blasted the musical “Rent” at full volume on my car’s CD player.[i]

♪There's only us
There's only this
Forget regret or life is yours to miss

No other road no other way
No day but today

There's only now
There's only here . . .
No other path
No other way
No day but today♪

 

Deprived of the pounding music and lush harmonies, the words lack the same senses of urgency, pleading, and poignancy that ring throughout every cell of my being as the song escalates, but the sentiment -- the exigency to live each day fully and deliberately – stands. Living in such raw awareness of the precarity of life, as certainly I do after surviving multiple cardiac arrests, illuminates life’s sheer preciousness in a way that moves one to tears, at least it does me.  The looming awareness of mortality forces an examination of one’s life. “Living a self-conscious life, under the pressure of time, I work with the consciousness of death at my shoulder,” wrote Audre Lorde after learning of her breast cancer diagnosis. “ . . . It helps shape the words I speak, the ways I love, my politic of action, the strength of my vision and purpose, the depth of my appreciation of living” (Cancer Journals,16).

 I have lived with that consciousness since I first came face-to-face with my mortality when, at the age of twenty, I was struck down in my prime by an infection in my heart that took me within moments of death, and left me hospitalized and bed-ridden for months. Like Lorde, it made me evaluate my purpose, my relationships, my politics, my daily actions through the lens of the brevity of our existence.  It made me different, odd, diving too deeply into questioning the meaning of life, living and loving too intensely than was comfortable for most people my age.  “You’re so deep!” “You’re so intense!” people would say to me as they backed away.  I was simply too much.

 I found camaraderie in books – in Albert Camus’s The Rebel, the whole premise of which stands on the politics that follow once having decided that life is worth living, his journals of his youth spent in hospitals with tuberculosis at about the same age I was, and his essays expounding his deep love of the sea, the sun, and life; in Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic,” requiring us “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” (57); in Adrienne Rich’s mandate for living an honorable life in her demanding “Of Women and Honor,” [ii] and most especially in the resonance of her poem “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev” --  “I have never loved/like this   I have never seen/ my own forces so taken up and shared/ and given back . . . We will not live/ to settle for less We have dreamed of this all of our lives.”[iii] 

I took risks in my work and relationships. I dived into feminist movement and action.  I gave birth to myself, and then to my child and experienced a love beyond telling.  And then, a little over a year after my child was born, my heart stopped in the middle of giving a concert.  They said I played my heart out. Having survived. back out in the world a little over a year later, undaunted, I ignored advice and in the midst of an impassioned speech to save a beloved stretch of beach, it stopped again. I’m one of the lucky few to have survived not one, not two, but three cardiac arrests.  My passions and actions, now tempered by an implantable defibrillator that would shock me into quietude lest my heart rate rise past the threshold of safety, I awaited, and finally received, a life-giving transplant from one whose life ended too soon.  And yet it had not ended entirely, for her heart continued beating, but in my body. So now this question – what does it require of my life, dear Jodi, to carry your heart in my heart?[iv]

 To carry -- the meanings are multiple: to support while transporting; to convey; to contain and direct the course of; to harbor within the body; to sustain the weight of; to provide sustenance for; to be solely responsible for the success, effectiveness, and continuation of; to prolong and maintain over time; to gain victory for – to name only the most pertinent ones.  For all of these are now my charge.  How best do I support you?  Sustain the weightiness of honoring your life?  Provide the appropriate sustenance to prolong your/our life over time and to be solely responsible for the success and continuation of that life? To gain a victory in that way for you?  To provide safe harbor, security, and comfort for your/our spiritual well-being?  How do I convey to those who loved you the sheer amazement at the steadiness of this new heart, the exquisite enjoyment of sunlight streaming through a window without fear, the gratitude for the years and precious moments you have given me? How do I direct the course of my/our life? It is as if I am living poet Mary Oliver’s query -- “Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?” 

I’ve heard these words from Oliver’s “The Sunny Day” quoted so many times that they verge on becoming trite, so I hesitate to use them here, except to recount the first time I heard them.  I had taken students to the local Benedictine retreat center where we spent time walking the labyrinth and talking about prayer. Sister Lois, the retreat center director, began our time together by sharing Oliver’s poem. I must have been a few years post-transplant at that point, and those final words grasped me by the heart and wouldn’t let go. Knowing viscerally how wild and precious this life is, the poet asked me not only to acknowledge that, but also to ponder what I was going to do with it.  More than this, she asked how was I going to honor it, for that is the meaning of “precious” after all – something worthy of honor.  But now this task carried a deeper responsibility.  How was I to live a life worthy of this honor, and not just of my own, but also of her life– the child’s whose heart I now carried in my heart?     

I had delved into Adrienne Rich’s “Women and Honor” dozens of times, and knew that honoring this life -- our lives -- required at the minimum my honesty with myself, my loved ones, my life pursuits. It demanded that I live in line with my values, that I act so as to enhance the possibility of life for every living being, and that I not settle for anything less than living “in accordance with that joy I knew myself to be capable of.” Above all, honoring this life asked that I not let a day go by without fully appreciating the opportunity to be a part of it.  Of course, I have – days when I’ve been so sick, or in such desperate grief, or gutted with worry, or simply bogged down with papers to grade or bureaucracies to navigate, that just getting through the day can feel like a chore.  But then a glorious sunrise, or stunning hoarfrost, or an unexpected kindness will remind me.  Or a political issue – an injustice being perpetrated on another, a threat to the land and the water, a violation of rights will stir me from complacence and require my action and speech.  Or the aching need of a friend, a loved one, a small child will remind me that, in the words of my favorite book on childrearing – “You can postpone anything but love” – and that the greatest and perhaps rarest gift I can give to anyone with the time that I have is generous, loving attention.   

 A transplant of any kind is often referred to as a “second chance.” Thirty years ago today I received that gift -- not only of life, but of the chance to live more deliberately, to live well, to do good, to become love, in deepest awareness of the preciousness of each day. And so, it is in gratitude and prayer that I repeat these words of e. e. cummings: 

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
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings . . .

 We fly together, you and I.  I carry your heart with me, you carry me with your heart. 

Sources

Camus, Albert. 1968. Lyrical and Critical Essays. Trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy. New York: Vintage.

______. 1956. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt.  New York: Vintage.

cummings, e.e. 2016. Complete Poems:1904-1962. New York: Liveright.

Larson, Jonathon. 1996. Rent.

Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press.

______. 1980. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Spinsters Ink.

Oliver, Mary. 2017. Devotions. New York: Penguin.

Rich, Adrienne. 1979. On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose: 1966-1978. New York: W.W. Norton.

______. 1978. The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977. New York: W. W. Norton.

Rolfe, Randy. 1985. You Can Postpone Anything but Love: Expanding Our Potential as Parents. Edgemont, PA: Ambassador Press.

[i] For those who do not know the story of Rent, it revolves around the precarity of life living impoverished and unhoused in the city, all in the context of the AIDS crisis. The composer, Jonathon Larson, himself tragically died at the age of 29 of an aortic dissection the day before Rent opened on Broadway.  Perhaps on some level he sensed the precarity of his own life for certainly his music pulses with that awareness.

[ii] The essay appears in Rich’s collection of essays, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence.

[iii] Elvira Shatayev was the leader of an all-women climbing party on Lenin Peak.  A sudden storm, considered to be the worst in 25 years, trapped them near the peak without anything to break the ferocity of the winds.  They did not survive. Her husband later found her diary when he climbed the peak to retrieve their bodies.  Adrienne Rich put Shatayev’s words to verse in her poem, “Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev,” The Dream of a Common Language.

[iv] My donor was a 9-year-old little girl whose name was Jodi. She died far too young of a brain injury following a small plane crash. Waiting for the helicopter to take me to the transplant hospital was a very sobering time, knowing that at that same time, someone was saying goodbye to their loved one.

   At that time, a transplanted heart was sewn into the upper chambers of the receiving heart, so I do carry Jodi’s heart in my heart. 

Kairos Time Redux

At a friend’s suggestion, I picked up a copy of May Sarton’s At Eighty-Two the other day. I’d read Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude decades ago, and it spoke to me so deeply of a life I wanted to live – a life filled with flowers, animals, friends, and days by the sea filled with writing.  Since I’d written about kairos time just a few weeks before, when I opened At Eighty-Two I was delightfully surprised to find that she had named this journal “Kairos.”  Sarton gave the term a different definition than I had -- “a unique time in a person’s life; an opportunity for change.”

Written near the end of Sarton’s life, the unique time she was referencing was aging — her coming to terms with it and how it presented occasions for change.  As I’ve witnessed friends and family members coming of age, so to speak, I’ve thought often of the challenges aging brings, as well as the opportunities.  Reading Sarton’s journal provided me with increased understanding and compassion for those who are ahead me on this journey, as well as time for reflection on the quality of their lives and what may lie ahead for me as I move toward what Sarton called “real old age.”  “70 seems so young!” she remarked from the perspective of the age of 82, so perhaps I have time to prepare, though like Sarton, my parents were aged in their 70s, my mother suffering a massive stroke that left her speechless at 72, the same age I will be on my next birthday, and my father the incapacity and dementia of advanced Parkinson’s disease in his mid-70s. 

Many of the entries in Sarton’s journal center around the changes she did not invite into her life – her diminished physical and mental capacities.  “Forgetting where things are, forgetting even the names of friends, names of flowers . . . forgetting so much makes me feel disoriented sometimes” (27).  I’ve certainly experienced all of these.  Recently, I spent many hours trying to remember where I’d put my son’s 1st year calendar, and many more trying to find an important notebook.  There’s a particular flower in my garden whose name I regularly forget, only knowing it begins with “a.”  I go through the list – allium, alyssum – ah, there it is, astilbe. I’ve yet to feel disoriented by this, though a bit disquieted, especially when I go down to the basement and in the short time it took to traverse the stairs no longer have any idea why I went down there.  Surely there was a reason.  I do wonder, however, about my dear sister, suffering from Alzheimer’s, as she can get lost in time and not know the present from the past, or of a friend, similarly afflicted and now deceased, who would get lost walking around his long-time neighborhood, or of my father who had awake nightmares, reliving soldiers bleeding out in the MASH he ran in World War II. What is it truly like to live in that state of disorientation?  How fearsome, even panicky it must be. How can one prepare for that? How can one provide comfort to those experiencing it? 

Many pages of Sarton’s journal are devoted to the piles of papers on her desk, the boxes of  unanswered letters, and the time she wastes – sometimes hours in a day – trying to find a misplaced bill or a particular photograph. The clutter consumes her and she longs for an empty desk.  She writes that she doesn’t want any more things in the house that will need to be disposed of, and that she is even bored with her books.  Many of my friends and I are at the same stage of decluttering and disposing.  It seems we spend the first three quarters of our lives accumulating and the rest of it trying to rid ourselves of things we no longer need nor want.  Books are the one exception for me, for I seem to accrue them perhaps even more quickly than I empty my house of them.  I did a great emptying of over two thousand books when I moved my officeful of books into my home.  It’s so difficult now to decide which ones should go.  Perhaps I’ll have a chance to teach again, or want to re-read a beloved text, or seek out particular passages for a blog post.  Maybe my heirs will appreciate this or that book someday.  My friend, Steve, who died many years ago now, appointed a mutual friend to be the executor of his books, with a particular order in which friends could peruse his books and choose those they would like.  I’d like to do the same.  For the time being, I post those I’m ready to part with on Facebook, and have such joy in placing them in the hands of friends who will enjoy them now. Plus, this often gives me the opportunity to visit with friends I haven’t seen in a long time.  The paper clutter is another story. I’m in the midst of another purge at the moment, though as I sort through the files and piles, I often find a treasure that I’m so glad to have kept. Perhaps I’ll revisit it in another five years.   My friend, Joan, stripped her belongings down to the bare bones in the last years of her life – her possessions finally amounting to a few forks, spoons, and knives; a couple of pans; three plates; two cups; a couple changes of clothes; three blankets and the sheets on her bed; a couch, a bed, some chairs and a table; a few books; and the new laptop that let her stay in touch with her grandchildren that I’d gotten for her a few weeks before she died. I have no desire to do the same, still appreciating the plants, artwork, scattered dog toys, piles of books and music, and enough dinnerware to welcome guests that make this house a home, but I admired her paring down of the paper clutter to one succinct notebook that made clear, if not easy, to know what to do and whom to call on that day I found her collapsed on her living room floor. 

Increasingly throughout her journal, Sarton ponders “how to deal with continual frustration about small things like trying to button a shirt” (27), unsettled by her “pitiable state of weakness and inability to do anything much” (78), her inability to walk around her garden – one of the great joys of her life, the difficulty of going up and down stairs, and the frightening fatigue that made getting out of bed each day a struggle.  I’m fortunate still to have energy, far more than I had in earlier years. In some ways I’ve had the unique opportunity to experience what it is to “youthen,” given what a particularly eloquent friend of mine has termed my “Benjamin Buttony” life of spending my 20s and 30s in and out of hospitals, with all sorts of limitations on my physical abilities, and having “died” at least three times.  I don’t look back on the glory days of my youth and vigor since I’ve been far more vital in my 50s and 60s than in younger years.  But like Sarton, I’m frustrated by what my hands can no longer do — as she says, small things, like trying to open jars or to snap the multitude of snaps on my grandson’s onesies, not to mention all the buckles on the stroller.  A long-time friend and I recently had a lively chat of all we now rely on – jar openers, pliers, and partners – to open ziplock bags, medicine bottles, baby food containers.  At least I can still type.  No longer able to write, Sarton had taken to dictating her books.  And while I’ve given up some favorite hikes, no longer trusting my balance on the steep slopes, I’m still able to go for long walks in the woods every day.  Perhaps one of the lessons I’m learning from this is the importance of appreciating every day those things I can still do. 

One of Sarton’s deepest discomforts and dissatisfactions of her old age was not having achieved the kind of recognition and acclaim she so desperately craved, bemoaning not being included in this or that anthology or having had her poetry reviewed for years, despite the dozens of books she had written, and the thousands sold, and the overwhelming number of letters from those who appreciated her work.  I am grateful to be rid of any need for that I may have had in my youth.  Perhaps that was one of the great gifts of struggling so mightily simply to live in my earlier years, and certainly a lesson to be culled from Sarton’s journal – to come into old age with a knowing that it is enough, no, more than enough, to have lived and loved well, to have given what we could give, and hopefully to have enhanced life for some and done a little good in the world. As Carol Christ put it so eloquently, that “while recognizing inevitable death, loss, and suffering,  . . .  our task is to love and understand, to live for a time, to contribute as much as we can to the continuation of life, to the enhancement of beauty, joy, and diversity” (321).

As she lost her abilities and capacities, Sarton increasingly dealt with depression, and came to a point where she welcomed death. Yet, she began to realize that one of her “ . . . problems has been that anything which was not writing at my desk did not seem like my real life or valid work . . . “ (107). In the later entries, she chastised herself on a nearly daily basis for all she had not accomplished.  I’ve suffered the same affliction much of my life, often considering only those things I truly consider to be “useful,” mostly to others, as worthy of my time, and rarely allowing myself the simple pleasures of playing the piano, putting together a jigsaw puzzle, listening to music, or sitting by the lake for any length of time.  Here I need to hearken to Sarton’s insight, revealed to her as she entered this new phase of life– “If I can accept this, not as a struggle to keep going at my former pace but as a time of meditation when I need ask nothing of myself, will nothing except to live as well as possible, as aware as possible, then I could feel I am preparing for a last great adventure as happily as I can.”  She was, she said, “learning a new kind of happiness . . . which has nothing to do with achievement or even creation” (252).  I’m not quite there yet, but I am sensing that this letting go of the need to be productive and accomplish so much in a day may be the most important lesson in this journal for me.     

The things that once made me aspire to a life like Sarton’s, however, continued to enliven her days, as they do mine.  She had a multitude of dear and long-lived friends and intimates with whom she corresponded and visited regularly.  Though Covid has made those loved dinners and lunches out with friends a thing of the past for me, I’m so grateful for the companionship of those with whom I correspond, speak, and walk regularly, or with whom I pick up as if no time has passed at all even though it’s been months or years.  I’ve found such treasure in friendships that now span twenty, fifty, even seventy years.  It is a different kind of knowing and loving than I ever knew possible – one of the greatest gifts of “real old age.”  She delighted in good food, and to those who encouraged her to eat a healthier diet she said, “damned if I’m not going to have a piece of chocolate every day” (262) — a passion I share. And of course, Sarton had her books; her house filled with flowers, which, she said, “are as important as food, perhaps more so” (60); and her revels in the sunrise, especially “when the leaves have gone,” and she could view “ a great sea of ocean from left to right,” enabling her to  see that “much is good” (133-134), as I do also, now that the leaves have gone and the great expanse of Superior opens before me. And then there is Pierrot, her beloved cat, who brought her such comfort and delight, and as she so often said, made her life livable.  What indeed, would we do without the unconditional love and deep comfort of the trust and companionship of our four-legged loved ones?

As I begin to experience, and occasionally bemoan, the diminishment of my physical and mental capacities rather than their expansion, I’m finding that what quickly comes to mind are the many other capacities that increase with age – patience, understanding, graciousness, and a humility engendered by all that is now so regularly humbling. I hope I can welcome this different kind of Kairos time, between the Christmas and the end of my years of life,[i] for the unique time that it is and the new opportunities it brings, with a recognition and acceptance my limitations, as well as a certain grace to myself for all I can no longer do while embracing what I can, and like Sarton, with a continuing delight in and appreciation for the gifts of friendship, flowers, first light, and furry ones. 

Sources

Christ, Carol. 1989. “Rethinking Theology and Nature.” In Plaskow, Judith and Carol Christ, eds. Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. 314-325.

Sarton, May. 1996. At Eighty-Two. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

[i] See my earlier post, “Kairos Time,” which I experience in the timeless days between Christmas and New Years’. 

We Were Told Not to Eat the Snow

As children growing up in the ‘50s, we were told not to eat the snow. That was the extent of my awareness of the clouds of toxic radiation circling the globe from atomic bomb atmospheric testing happening at that time.  Only later would I learn about the US dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and as a grad student in political science study the pros and cons of the international defense strategy of “mutually assured destruction” – or MAD -- the “mad” attempt at insuring peace through the ever-increasing stockpiling of nuclear weaponry.  But it wasn’t until reading Susan Griffin’s A Chorus of Stones that I would learn of the secrecy and deceit at the heart of the entire project of the creation, testing, and effects of nuclear weapons.  A few years later, I had the privilege of having among my students a young man from Nagasaki. He was concerned that, unlike Nagasaki, where a ceremony is held annually to commemorate the victims of the bombing and to remind the world of the horrors of nuclear war, here in the US, the only country actually to have used the atom bomb, there is little memory or awareness.  So he brought with him a book and a film documenting the reality of the horrific effects of the atomic bomb, asking me to place them in the library so people here would know the truth of what happened there.[i] 

John Hersey, the first reporter whose reports that shed light on the realities of what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki managed to evade the US censors, said in a 1986 interview, “’I think that what has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it’s been memory.’”[ii]  He feared the fading of that memory of the horrific destruction wreaked upon the world by the bomb. Indeed, my experience with students over many years is that they have had little or no awareness of the ways in which nuclear bombs differ from other weaponry, or of the effects of radiation on every living thing in their immediate path and beyond.

The film Oppenheimer has recently brought visibility to Robert Oppenheimer, “the father of the atomic bomb,” himself and the Manhattan Project that led to the creation of the first atomic bomb, but like radiation, the story of the many who were involved, been deeply impacted, or suffered the effects of the atomic bomb remain invisible.  It’s my intention here to shed a bit of light on these.

The film accurately portrays the way those choosing the site of the Manhattan Project regarded it as being “mostly empty – just a few Indians,” as if the indigenous people of this land don’t count, as surely they haven’t for the long history of the United States. In reality, in addition to the plants and animals in the region, several thousands of primarily Native and Hispanic people lived in the area. 32 Hispano families in Los Alamos were forced to leave their homes with only 48 hours’ notice, and with little or no compensation.  Their homes were bulldozed and cattle shot.  19,000 people, including many pueblo-dwelling Native Americans, lived near the Trinity atomic bomb test site, located 200 miles from the lab in Los Alamos. including many pueblo-dwelling Native Americans. In addition, nearly half a million people, most of them Hispanic and Native American, lived in the Tularosa Basin, the 150-mile radius from the site of the explosion. Those directly impacted remember the bright light of the explosion in the middle of the night, and ash falling all the next day.  They were never warned about the test before or after, and were later falsely led to believe that they’d witnessed an explosion of ammunitions at the nearby Almogordo Air Base. “They refused to see us,” said Tina Cordova, founder of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, who believes the ethnic makeup of Los Alamos and the White Sands testing site is central to why these sites were chosen. “We were the first people ever exposed to radiation as the result of an atomic bomb, and most of us were Hispanos and Native Americans.”[iii] As is true throughout, the story of the atomic bomb is also the tale of whose lives were considered expendable, and whose not. It was later discovered that radiation levels in the blast radius were nearly 10,000 times what were deemed acceptable levels at that time.  The nuclear radiation infiltrated the air, soil, and water and continues to cause cancers in inordinate numbers in people five generations following the original explosion.

A similar story of displacement and environmental degradation occurred at the several different communities unknowingly involved in the creation of the first atomic bomb. Unknowingly because, as was stressed in the film, secrecy and compartmentalization required that workers at the several different facilities involved knew nothing about any of the others, or what they themselves were participating in. In Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where enriched uranium for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was manufactured, around 3000 poor farm people were displaced, with little notice or compensation, in order to build the 60,000 acre facility so secret that it had no name on a map for the initial years during the development of the bomb.  The amount of radioactive and other toxic contamination there was revealed only decades later when toxic and radioactive wastes were found in the groundwater, as well as forty miles downstream in White Oak Creek.

In Hanford, Washington, plutonium for the Trinity test and the bomb detonated over Nagasaki was produced at a facility built close to the Columbia River, whose waters were used to cool the nuclear reactors at the site, and in which nuclear and other heavy metal and toxic waste was dumped. Here again, the army displaced and relocated inhabitants of Hanford and White Bluffs, Washington, as well as the Wanapum Nation. Radioactive waste from the plant quickly spread via the Columbia and prevailing winds. Clouds of radioactive iodine were released, covering pasturelands, croplands, and forests hundreds of miles away, exposing at least 13,000 people. Members of the Yakima and Nez Perce tribes, who depended on the Columbia River and its fish, began to report that the fish in the Columbia could be seen “glowing” at night. Solid nuclear waste had been buried in pits and corrosion-prone canisters near the Columbia, and liquid nuclear waste stored on site in underground tanks that began developing leaks. Clean-up efforts began in 1989 and are expected to continue at least into the 2040s.[iv]

Mallinckrodt Chemical Works, located near St. Louis, Missouri, refined uranium for the Manhattan Project. Leftover radioactive waste continues to impact residents of the city of St. Louis, and especially Coldwater Creek, into which deteriorating drums of radioactive waste leaked for decades. Yet it was not until 2011, when several high school friends reconnected and discovered that many of them were sick with rare cancers, that they launched an investigation that revealed that 120,000 tons of nuclear waste material had been dumped into a creek where they had played for years as children.

Of course, those most directly impacted by the atomic bomb were the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on whom the atomic bombs were dropped, obliterating every man-made structure, irradiating the soil and water, and destroying every living thing -- killing an estimated 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 74,000 in Nagasaki. The effects of the bomb continued far beyond that initial blast. Radiation from the bombings would go on to claim hundreds of thousands of lives. The survivors, known as hibakusha (“atomic bomb-affected people) suffered from radiation poisoning -- including hair loss, bleeding gums, fatigue, purple spots, fever, and death, and faced ostracism and discrimination as radiation sickness was considered to carry evil spirits or be contagious.

The lies and cover-up continued after the bombs had been dropped and the war was over. Even though Japanese doctors began to suspect their patients suffered from radiation sickness, Major General Leslie Groves, the military director of the Manhattan Project, dismissed these suspicions, stating in a New York Times article that if there was any truth to the Japanese claim that people died from radiation poisoning “the number was very small.” He would later state before a Senate hearing that radiation poisoning was “without undue suffering” and a “very pleasant way to die.”[v]

The US government continued its efforts to deny and cover up the true effects of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by not allowing reporters into the area, and when they were, their reports were censored. John Hersey, whose reporting first disclosed the devastation of the atomic bomb in a piece published in the New Yorker Magazine in August of 1946, had to go to great lengths to get his story past the censors.[vi] As recently related by Lesley Blume, what was most unsettling to Hersey was not only “that the United States had unleashed destruction and suffering upon a largely civilian population on a scale unprecedented in human history” but also that it then “tried to cover up the human cost of its new weapon.”[vii]

Perhaps the US government wanted to keep the true effects of the bomb from the public so as not to sully its new reputation as the liberator of Europe and the leader of the Free World.  Or perhaps it did not want to make the horrors known so that it could, over Oppenheimer’s objections, continue to build bigger and more destructive nuclear weapons, which they have continued to do at Los Alamos to this day. As part of this process, in 1946, the United States began twelve years of nuclear bomb tests, some a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, in the Marshall Islands, population 52,000, primarily on the Bikini and Enewetak Atolls, remote enough and on a people considered disposable enough to once again render them invisible to most of the world.

Telling them they were a chosen people and the use of the atoll was for the good of humanity in order to prevent future wars, the Navy relocated the people living on the Bikini Atoll to another uninhabited atoll 125 miles away. As a result of the testing, some of the islands vaporized; others became uninhabitable. In a futile attempt to make the Enewetak Atoll habitable again, the US army scraped off the topsoil of the southern islands, burying it in a bomb crater on another island.[viii] Generations later, sea turtles of Enewetak still carry radiation.

On the Rongelap atoll, 100 miles away from Bikini, inhabitants suffered direct fallout from the 1954 tests. Immediately after, a third of all the pregnant women suffered fetal death. Fetal death rates remain high to this day.  By 1966, 52% of the people on Rongelap who were under ten at the time of test developed thyroid cancer; by 1989, the rate was 69%.  Others suffered respiratory diseases, miscarriages, stillbirths.  Perhaps the worst was the grossly deformed fetuses known as “jellyfish babies” who had no eyes, heads, arms, or legs. While able at first to breathe, they were only able to live a few hours. It is still not possible safely to eat food grown on the island. The combined effects of the reproductive deaths and high rates of cancers have resulted in the deaths of more than 15,000 people.  But it was not until traces of radioactive material were found in parts of Japan, India, Australia, Europe, and the United States that the US shut down its testing in the Pacific and instead began testing on mainland US. 

While the Army conducted some testing in Alaska, Colorado, and Mississippi, most of the testing in the continental US occurred at the main test site in Nevada, 65 miles north of Las Vegas, a site chosen once again for its “remoteness,” as though no one lived there and as if the radiation could be contained. Yet, in the nearly 1000 tests, 400,000 American soldiers, now known as “atomic soldiers,” were deliberately exposed to radiation from nuclear tests, both for training purposes and for the army to obtain information on the effects of exposure. They were ordered into trenches near the blast site. In contrast to the protective gear worn by technicians in the labs, the soldiers wore only helmets and gas masks for protection, and were told to cover their faces with their arms.  The blast knocked them to the ground, and they later reported being able to see the bones and blood vessels in their hands.  Many were haunted by nightmares and PTSD, and suffered radiation-related diseases.  They developed high rates of cancer, particularly nasal and prostate cancer, as well as leukemia, with a death rate from leukemia that was 50% higher than that of military personnel who had not been exposed. They also suffered from gaslighting, as the military consistently denied the facts of the amount of radiation to which they’d been exposed, as well as the causal relation between their illnesses and exposure to radiation. In some cases, entire medical records disappeared.  The entire operation was clandestine. Soldiers were sworn to secrecy.  To tell anyone and even talk among themselves was considered treason, punishable by a $10,000 fine or 10 years in prison.[ix] 

Until 1963 when the US, Britain, and the Soviet Union signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, these were all above-ground tests, generating a considerable amount of radioactive fallout. Unaware of the dangers, some civilians became exposed by having “watch parties” in designated areas where they could witness the blasts.  But most were exposed unknowingly. Those most immediately affected by fallout carried by the wind were individuals living in parts of Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, now known as Downwinders. As Rebecca Solnit so poignantly describes this, “The nuclear bombs being exploded there regularly were a brutality against all the living things downwind, reservation dwellers, ranchers, livestock, small-town people, and wildlife, in those rehearsals for the end-of-the-world war..” [x] Downwinders have suffered high rates of cancer and birth defects.[xi]  Studies now show that the fallout reached 46 of the 48 continental United States, and undoubtedly other countries as well, as nuclear radiation was carried by high-level winds and deposited as rain and snow, landing on trees,[xii] crops, and grasses eaten by cows, where it became concentrated in cows’ milk, consumed disproportionately by children.  It’s estimated that the death toll from atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in the 1950s has been responsible for about 400,000 deaths in the United States alone. [xiii]

……..

The news of the first bomb being dropped on Hiroshima was met with celebration and applause around the Allied world.  Albert Camus, then editor-in-chief of the French Resistance newspaper, Combat, was one of only a few who denounced the atomic bomb. In his editorial of August 8, 1945, Camus wrote: “We can sum it up in one sentence: our technical civilization has just reached its greatest level of savagery. We will have to choose, in the more or less near future, between collective suicide and the intelligent use of our scientific conquests.  Meanwhile we think there is something indecent in celebrating a discovery whose use has caused the most formidable rage of destruction ever known to man.”[xiv]

At a time when the world teeters yet again on the brink of nuclear war, we live in peril of the denial of the realities of the devastation these weapons cause, as if in scraping off the top layer and burying it somewhere unseen we might be immune from its effects. We may fancy ourselves a powerful nation with our possession of over 5000 nuclear warheads,[xv] but as Adrienne Rich wrote of Marie Curie, who died of the radiation she discovered: “She died   a famous woman    denying/her wounds/denying/her wounds   came   from the same source as her power.” [xv] May we reveal rather than deny our wounds, for it is only in exposing the wounds we have inflicted on others and ourselves that we can learn from our mistakes, so as not to repeat them, and begin the process of healing.

Sources

Blume, Lesley M.M.  2020. Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks

Camus, Albert. 1991. Albert Camus: Between Hell and Reason: Essays from the Resistance Newspaper “Combat,” 1944-1947.  Selected and Translated by Alexandre de Gramont. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.

Atomic Tests During the 1950s Probably Killed Nearly Half a Million Americans – Mother Jones

Coldwater Creek radioactive waste cleanup tops $400M | STLPR    

Environmental Consequences - Nuclear Museum

Federal Guidance Report No. 3: Health Implications of Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Testing through 1961 (epa.gov)

Griffin, Susan. 1993. A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War. New York: Anchor Books.

Hanford Site | History, Cleanup, & Facts | Britannica

Here's the story not told in Nolan's Oppenheimer about those forced off their land in New Mexico | CBC News

How A-Bomb Testing Changed Our Trees : Krulwich Wonders... : NPR

How growing up near Coldwater Creek wrought years of pain | STLPR

Inhabited Desert: The Untold Story Of The Trinity Test (kunm.org)

Marshall Islands – Nuclear Museum

‘Nature does not forget’: These 4 animals are radioactive (nationalgeographic.com)

Nevada Test Site – Nuclear Museum

Nevada Test Site Downwinders - Nuclear Museum

Nuclear Weapons by Country 2024 (worldpopulationreview.com)

Oppenheimer true story: Christopher Nolan’s movie omits the first victims of nuclear testing in New Mexico. (slate.com)

People exposed to fallout from 1st atomic bomb test still fighting for compensation : NPR

Rich, Adrienne. 1978. “Power” in The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Seager, Joni. 1993. Earth Follies: Coming to Feminist Terms with the Global Environmental Crisis.  New York: Routledge.

Southard, Susan. Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2015, quoted in Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Nuclear Museum)

Should Oppenheimer Have Shown Hiroshima & Nagasaki? Controversial Debate Explained & Why It Didn't (screenrant.com)

Solnit, Rebecca. 2020. Recollections of My Nonexistence.  New York: Viking.

Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Nuclear Museum

Testing in Nevada Desert Is Tied to Cancers - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

The Atomic Bomb’s First Victims Were in New Mexico | HISTORY

The Atomic Soldiers: U.S. Veterans, Used as Guinea Pigs, Break the Silence - The Atlantic

The lasting legacy of the first atomic bomb | 1A (the1a.org)

The Truth About What Happened Here: New Mexico and the Manhattan Project — The Latinx Project at NYU

Was the Oppenheimer test site unpopulated? - Los Angeles Times (latimes.com) 

[i] The book is available in the University of Minnesota Duluth library. [Photo collection of atomic bomb destruction: Nagasaki] - University of Minnesota (umn.edu). I do not know what became of the film.

[ii] Quoted in Blume, 172.

[iii] The lasting legacy of the first atomic bomb | 1A (the1a.org)

[iv] The half-life of plutonium-239 is about 24,000 years.  To regard the area as “cleaned up” by 2040 is yet another exercise in denial.

[v] Quoted in Southard.

[vi] That article was subsequently republished as a book, Hiroshima.

[vii] Blume, 121.

[viii] They dumped it into a bomb crater on Runit Island, covering it with concrete that has a life expectancy of 300-1000 years.  The half-life of some nuclear waste is 24,000 years. 

[ix] Pres. Bill Clinton lifted the imposed secrecy requirement in 1994.

[x] Solnit, 195.

[xi] In 1990, Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to make payments to some of the people who claimed to have been affected by the fallout from the nuclear tests, but these payments are only available under a limited set of conditions. Those affected by fallout from the first test of the bomb made at Los Alamos were not included in this and have yet to be compensated.

[xi]i Studies have shown that trees around the world that were alive during the era of nuclear testing carry a carbon-14 atom.  The same is true of persons conceived during that time.

[xii] For one investigation into the health effects of the 1950’s nuclear testing, see Federal Guidance Report No. 3: Health Implications of Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Testing through 1961 (epa.gov)

[xiv] Camus, 110.

[xv] This number is actually a substantial reduction – a testimony to a bit of sanity in global efforts to reduce the number of nuclear warheads from a peak of 70, 300 in 1986 to approximately 13,800 today.

[xv] Rich, 3.

Kairos Time

I love the time between the winter Solstice and New Year’s – a time of suspended animation, a reprieve from the demands of daily life, a respite from the woes of the world, from needing to pay attention to the time of day and tasks that need to be accomplished.  A whole week with nothing scheduled on the calendar. Simply presence. It is a liminal time — the threshold between the old year and the new – a time when we pause and reflect on the year past and our hopes for the year to come. It is a moment of what the Greeks called Kairos time, as opposed to Chronos time, by which we measure most of our lives -- in seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years.

In the years I spent in academia, my time was governed by institutional structures of classes, meetings, due dates, and deadlines -- a Chronos time that often forced me to live in the future rather than the present.  Course scheduling needed to happen far in advance. Book orders for the next semester needed to be placed mid-way through the previous one.  Course syllabi planned students’ readings and assignments for the next several months ahead.  Learning was to occur in specified blocks of times, which always struck me as such a bizarre way to teach and learn, when we’d have to break off discussion and deep learning simply because the hour was up.   

One of the benefits of retirement is the ability to step off that particular treadmill. Nevertheless, most of the world lives on Chronos time.  It is useful, allowing us to make appointments, find times to meet with friends, know when to put the trash out, pay bills, attend events and gatherings. But chronicity of time seems to be increasing.  Get-togethers with friends no longer happen spontaneously. Instead, everyone gets out their planners to search for a mutually open spot. Even phone calls are scheduled now – texting first to see when someone might be free to talk. 

Childhood has also changed that way.  Other than school and being home in time for dinner, as children our days simply flowed from one activity to another, especially in the carefree days of summer.  Now children’s lives are scheduled with after-school lessons and activities and camps.  I remember distinctly the day my son told me that his life was too scheduled and he needed to drop some of his after-school activities.  At seven!  I’m grateful he knew he needed the time we all need simply to be, to create, to imagine, to play, to rest. 

Chronos time vanishes in the wake of birth and death.  The day my mother died I entered the space of grief time where my world stopped while the rest of the world went on. How strange it seemed that other people went about their daily lives as if nothing significant had happened, if it were just an ordinary day. It was as if I’d stepped off the space/time continuum and was watching life on earth from afar. The same was true on the day my son was born, where my world closed in to only this time, this place, this love, with no cognizance of any life beyond this moment.  I’ve been able to create those spaces as well, on solo retreats where the days flow into each other and for a few days I am removed from the world, beholden to no clock and no one (except my dog). Snow days – those unexpected gifts from the snow goddesses where traffic stops; schools, stores, and workplaces close; events are cancelled -- grant us time simply for play – board games, sledding, building snowmen, playing fox and geese, and for hygge – the Scandinavian word that captures the essence of the coziness and conviviality of gathering under comforters, reading by the fire, and drinking hot cocoa while watching the snowflakes dance outside. It seems wrong that since schools learned how to rely on remote learning during the pandemic snow days have become “remote learning days” instead.  We need those unexpected gifts of time and space occasionally to grace our lives. As ecotheologian Mary DeJong has said, “Chronos time is needed to survive. Kairos time is needed to thrive.”

We don’t need to wait for life and the weather to grant us Kairos time.  We can choose to make it a regular practice.  We know it as “sabbath.” As practiced in Judaism, the weekly practice of Sabbath -- from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday -- is a time set aside from work, travel, devices, and screens.  Minister Wayne Muller, author of my favorite book on Sabbath, writes, “In Sabbath time we remember to celebrate what is beautiful and sacred; we light candles, sing songs, tell stories, eat, nap, and make love. It is a time to let our work, our lands, our animals lie fallow, to be nourished and refreshed” (7). Whether a day, a week, or a few moments at the beginning and end of the day, we can commit to setting aside Chronos time and its demands to enter Kairos time, fully present to the present moment. 

As I take time away from the news of continued death and destruction of war in Ukraine and Gaza, tensions in the Red Sea, mass shootings, the impending 2024 election -- I know my ability to insulate myself from that world for a time is a privilege not granted to those who are living  in the midst of it.  Yet I also know that taking regular sabbath time is an antidote to violence. As Muller writes, “Sabbath time . . . can invite a healing of this violence. . . . When we act from, a place of deep rest, we are more capable of cultivating what the Buddhists would call right understanding, right action, and right effort.  . . .Once people feel nourished and refreshed, they cannot help but be kind; just so, the world aches for the generosity of well-rested people” (5,7, 11).

The forecast is looking hopeful for an upcoming snow day.  Oh that we could grant the world a year of snow days, where all the world could, in the words of the mystic Rumi, “Come out of the circle of time, and into the circle of love.”

 Sources

DeJong, Mary. “Wild Autumn.” Waymarkers.

Muller, Wayne. 1999.  Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest.  New York: Bantam.