Seeds of Hope

“. . . I know, yes, there is renewal, /because this is what the seeds ask of us/ with their own songs/ when we listen to their small bundle of creation,/ of a future rising from the ground . . .” - Linda Hogan

The first seed catalogs started arriving in the mail even before the turn of the new year.  In an annual ritual of hope, in the depths of winter we turn our thoughts and dreams to growing things – seeds of heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, carrots, and beans that will feed us and grace our tables in the summer and fall, and colorful marigolds, nasturtiums, and zinnias that will delight all summer long with their beauty.  Is this the invincible summer of which Camus wrote?[i] 

Even as a young child, I yearned to plant seeds, and asked for a small patch of earth somewhere where I could grow a bit of lettuce and maybe some carrots. I sensed my mother found this a bit curious, since we had no vegetable garden.  Nor did any of our friends and neighbors.  I just knew I wanted to dig in the dirt, sow seeds, and tend a garden. My mom let me have a small area of dirt in a neglected corner by the garage, and for several years I planted, and weeded, and watered, and watched the lettuce grow. (I didn’t particularly like lettuce at that point in my life, but I loved growing it!)

It is a bit of a miracle – the growing of seeds. I’m in awe of “. . . the magic,” as Jane Goodall describes it, “the life force within a seed that is so powerful that tiny roots, in order to reach the water, can work their way through rocks, and the tiny shoot, in order to reach the sun, can find a way through crevices in a brick wall” (Seeds of Hope, 118). I especially marvel at the tiniest of seeds – lettuce, kale, carrots, tomatoes -- those barely-the-size-of-a-pinhead seeds that hold all the information to become large and leafy greens, long sturdy root vegetables, and round, luscious, juicy, voluptuous fruits (or are tomatoes vegetables?) that feed us year-round  -- sliced fresh and made into sauces, salsas, juices, stews, and soups. 

Just add dirt, water, and warmth and the unfolding begins. It is always such a delight when the first shoots pop up through the dirt.  Yay, it worked!   

At the beginning of the pandemic, fearing that we would soon be without fresh vegetables, I began growing lettuce indoors, (Yes, I like lettuce now.) as well as the tomato, cucumber, and squash plants I’d usually buy from a nursery.  What’s more, as gardener Meg Cowden notes, seed-starting indoors, “provides a wellspring of hope as frigid winter days turn to weeks and months. . . .it is far more joyful to measure the growth of our seedlings than the accumulation of snow on garden beds” (161).

The seed is a miracle in and of itself -- an undeveloped embryo of the mature plant, containing the DNA passed on for millennia, surrounded by all the food and nutrition it needs to give it a good start, with a protective coating to insure its safety until the conditions are right for it to germinate.[ii] Each mature plant creates dozens, sometimes hundreds of offspring seeds, insuring the continuance of the species for generations to come. Plus, they share their bounty with us. Of the 250,000-300,000 varieties of plant species, 10,000-50,000 are edible, and 7000 are farmed and used for food.[iii]  

Humans have been saving and planting seeds for millennia, but in recent decades, this long tradition has nearly come to a halt.  Following World War II, chemical companies, needing to find new markets for the chemicals they had been developing for use during the war, found an outlet for their chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides in agriculture.  Touted as “The Green Revolution” that would save millions from starvation, industrialized agriculture relied on hybridized high-yield seeds that required massive amounts of fertilizer and irrigation to grow.  The emphasis on monocrops for high yields of cash crops led to reduction of seed diversity and to reliance on more and more chemicals as these farming techniques rapidly depleted the soil of its inherent nutritional value.  Add to this the 1980 landmark US Supreme Court decision in Diamond v. Chakrabarty.[iv]  Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty, along with GE, had genetically engineered pseudomonas bacteria and sought to secure a patent for it, in violation of US law excluding plants and animals from patents. However, the Court held that life is patentable as long as there is sufficient human intervention to alter naturally occurring lifeforms.  The decision created the precedent for seeds becoming “owned” under intellectual property rights. Soon after, the US Patent Office decision in ex parte Hibberd in 1985[v] secured the right to patent genetically modified (GM) plants based on the decision in the Chakrabarty case, clearing the way for thousands of genetically engineered seeds to be patented.[vi]  Indigenous farmers, who had been saving seeds for millennia, now were forced instead to buy these patented seeds under GATT[vii]  and as conditions to secure loans under International Monetary Fund and World Bank “structural adjustment programs” (SAPs). Patent protection, argues ecofeminist and seed advocate Vandana Shiva, “transforms farmers into suppliers of free raw material, displaces them as competitors, and makes them totally dependent on industrial supplies for vital inputs such as seed” (Biopiracy, 54). 

One of the many miracles of seeds is that over thousands of years they have evolved to thrive under different environmental conditions, resulting in copious varieties of seeds  -- thousands of varieties of rice in India, potatoes in the Andes, sweet potatoes in Papua New , maize in Mexico, wheat in China, apples in the United States.[viii] However, the patenting of seeds and their forced use as dictated by First World multinational corporations, as well as the fact that four multinational corporations control around 60 percent of the world’s seed sales[ix] has led to the demise of seed diversity. Of the ten thousand varieties of wheat in China, only a thousand remain. Similarly, Mexico has lost 80% of its maize varieties, and the thousands of rice varieties once grown in the Philippines have diminished by 98% to the two varieties introduced by the Green Revolution.[x]  Between 1903 and 1983, the United States lost 93% of its seed diversity.[xi] 

Locally, the patenting of seeds has threatened multiple varieties of wild rice – manoomin -- found in Minnesota lakes. The University of Minnesota began developing its own version of domesticated “wild” rice in the early 1900s, and in 2000, U of M plant geneticist, Ron Phillips, mapped the wild rice genome, making it available for public use.[xii] Most of what is now sold as “wild” rice is actually paddy-harvested patented “wild” rice grown in California.  

Additionally, the patenting of seeds has made the thousands-year-old practice of seed saving illegal, as is the sharing of seeds from farmer to farmer.  The most notorious case is that of Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser, who regularly saved and shared his seed, but whose canola crops were contaminated with Roundup Ready canola pollen blown into his fields from neighboring corporate farms. When Monsanto trespassed onto his fields, took samples, and found Roundup Ready canola plants mixed in with Schmeiser’s own canola plants, they sued him for violation of patents. Ultimately, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled in favor of Monsanto, but also ruled that Schmeiser owed Monsanto nothing.

Closer to home, the legality of seed sharing became an issue when in 2013 our local library decided to start a seed library. The project, initially proposed by Kelly Erb, an intern with the Institute for a Sustainable Future[xiii], was begun with great hopes that patrons could check out seeds for their home gardens, with the understanding that they would save a portion of their seeds and return these to the library for next year’s use. Project leaders hoped this would preserve locally adapted seed varieties. Unfortunately, after the seed library came to the public’s attention, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture informed the library that they were in violation of a Minnesota statute that prohibited the exchange of non-commercial seeds. [xiv] Library Manager Carla Powers commented, “ . . . the law went so far as to make it illegal for gardeners to exchange a handful of seeds with one another” (Popovitch).  But this did not end the library’s efforts.  A number of ally organizations[xv] stepped up to create an amendment to the statute that exempted the exchange of non-commercial seeds from testing, labeling, and licensing laws. This inspired a state-wide effort to change the law. Duluth, Minneapolis, and St. Paul city councils all passed resolutions calling on the state to change its law, which was successfully accomplished in that year’s legislative session.[xvi]

Resistance to patented seeds and prohibitions against seed saving has risen around the globe in seed-saving farmers’ networks and seed banks. Here in Minnesota, Ojibwe bands throughout Minnesota requested that the U of M stop its genetic work on wild rice out of concern that GM wild rice plants would contaminate naturally occurring wild rice due to pollen being distributed through wind, water currents, and waterfowl.  Receiving no response, they lobbied the state legislature, which in 2007 passed a law that stipulated regulations on the release of genetically modified wild rice. [xvii] 

One of the largest resistance movements, the seed-saving network Navdanya in India, which is based on the Hindu principles of satyagraha  -- holding firmly to the truth, and swaraj and swadeshi – self-rule, affirms farmers’ rights to determine their own lives and to produce, exchange, modify, and sell seed. “The seed has become the site and symbol of freedom in the age of manipulation and monopoly of its diversity,” wrote Shiva. “It embodies diversity and the freedom to stay alive” (Biopiracy, 126). 

Probably the best-known seed bank is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, the world’s largest secure seed repository. Housed in vaults dug into the side of a mountain on a remote island in the Norwegian Svalbard archipelago, with the capacity to house 2.25 billion seeds, the vault currently stores more than 4000 plants in a natural deep freeze. Often referred to as the “doomsday vault,” it was created to secure a duplicate of every food seed from around the world – a bulwark against the worst, a promise of possibility for the future. 

Every saved seed is a harbinger of hope. In a Women’s Studies senior seminar on motherhood, one of my students, Katie Witzig, combining her art and WS majors, created replicas of dozens of different kinds of seeds out of pottery. To her, the seed was the quintessential symbol of motherhood. Like mothers and fathers everywhere, the seed nourishes and keeps her offspring safe until it’s ready to be sent out into the world in hopes that it will flourish and contribute to the life and well-being of the world.   

Seeds are the very essence of life and resilience. Even though it’s winter here now, and the ground covered with more than two feet of snow, the woods are filled with an abundance of seeds just waiting for the conditions to be right to be released into the world.

 I’ll soon join them, starting seeds in little containers filled with soil, add a bit of water, warm them under the grow light, and hope. This year I’ll grow mostly heirloom varieties, which unlike the hybridized versions, can reproduce themselves year to year, and join the long tradition of saving seeds to be planted next year, when perhaps my then one-year-old grandson -- who now, like the seeds, is incubating safely inside his mother until the conditions are right for him to be born -- will help me plant the seeds I’ve saved for his future. 

“People saved these seeds because they loved these seeds, and they thought we might love them, too . . . . Whoever saved the seed loved us before they knew us. . . .”  – Ross Gay [xviii]

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Sources

27 Organizations Working to Conserve Seed Biodiversity – Food Tank

Ananda Mohan ‘Al’ Chakrabarty 1938–2020 | Nature Biotechnology

Bouayad, Aurelian. April 2020. “Wild Rice Protectors: An Ojibwe Odyssey,” Environmental Law Review.  Vol 22 25-42.

Camus, Albert. 1968. Lyrical and Critical Essays. Philip Thody, ed. New York: Vintage Books.

Cowden, Meg McAndrews. 2022. Plant, Grow, Harvest, Repeat. Portland, Oregon: Timber Press.

Duluth will be home to state's first public seed library | MPR News.

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

Goodall, Jane, with Gary McAvoy and Gail Hudson. 2005. Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating.  New York: Warner Books.

Goodall, Jane. 2014. Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of Plants. With Gail Hudson.  New York: Grand Central Publishing.

Hogan, Linda. 2020. “Ceremony for the Seeds.” in A History of Kindness. Salt Lake City: Torrey House Press.

Krause, Kea. “What Seed Saving Can Teach Us About the End of the World,” Orion. Orion Magazine - What Seed-Saving Can Teach Us About the End of the World.

LaDuke, Winona. 2005. Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming. Boston: South End.

Popovitch, Trish. 2014. “The Seed Exchange Library that Fought the Law and Won” Seedstock. The Seed Exchange Library That Fought the Law and Won | Smart Cities Dive 

Shiva, Vandana. 1997. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge.  Boston: South End Press.

______. 1989. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development.  London: Zed Books.

_____. 2000. Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. Boston: South End Press.

Steingraber, Sandra.  1997. Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment.  Reading, Massachusetts: Perseus Books.

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 [i] “In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me lay an invincible summer.” Lyrical and Critical Essays, 169.

[ii] Despite the expiration date on my seed packets, this may be decades, or in the case of the date palm, “Methuselah,” thousands of years in the future. “Methuselah” – a Judean date palm found by archaologists studying the ruins of Masada from the time of King Herod was planted and it grew from the oldest seed to be woken.  Others from 1300 years ago and  600 years ago have also bloomed.

[iii] Shiva, Stolen Harvest, 79.

[iv] 447 US 303

[v] 227 U.S.P.Q. 443 (Bd. Pat. App. 1985 granted patents on the tissue culture, seed, and whole plant of a corn line. It  included 260 separate claims, granting the right to exclude others from use of all 260 aspects. Shiva, Biopiracy, 55. 

[vi] According to a Department of Agriculture report, more than 18,000 plant patents were granted to inventors between 1990 and 2014.

[vii] Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1947). The World Trade Organization (WTO) is the successor to GATT.

[viii]  Shiva, Biopiracy, 79.

[ix] Bayer (which bought Monsanto in 2018), Corteva, ChemChina, and BASF. (Krause.)

[x] Shiva, Stolen Harvest, 80.

[xi] Krause.

[xii] LaDuke, 175.

[xiii] The Institute for a Sustainable Future, founded by Jamie Harvie, is based in Duluth, Minnesota.  Its mission is to “support and improve ecological health through advocacy, research, consultation and education.” Institute for a Sustainable Future (ISF) (isfusa.org)

[xiv] Mn Statute 21.80-21.92.

[xv] The Institute for a Sustainable Future, St. Paul Ramsey County Food and Nutrition Council, St Paul’s West Side Seed Library and Do it Green! Minnesota all worked on legislation, and The co-chairs of Minneapolis Home Grown Food Policy Council, Russ Henry and Nadja Berneche of Gardening Matters acted as mediators during the process (Popovitch).

[xvi] The Minnesota seed laws can be read in full at the state’s Department of Agriculture website.  The USDA provides a link to each state’s Department of Agriculture that show non-commercial seed exchange laws for the individual states. The Duluth Public Library was able to continue its seed library for about five years, but sadly eventually closed due to reduced staffing at the library and support from partner organizations. My thanks to Stacy LaVres who first told me about the Duluth Public Library seed library, found the pertinent article about it, and gave me other important information.

[xvii] While the legislation creates some protections, it does guarantee the safety of wild rice, which has now also come under threat by the degradation and pollution of wild rice lakes by Enbridge Line 3, which was constructed through wild rice lakes last year despite years of public hearings and public comment strongly opposed to the pipeline, as well as prayer and protest and water protector resistance.  Those protecting the waters were arrested for defending the water and rice for us all.  Many are still awaiting trial.  In 2019, the White Earth Band announced the adoption of a Tribal ordinance entitled “Rights of Manoomin” (Bouayad).

[xviii] Inciting Joy, 36-37.

Distracted by Beauty

I keep trying to stay focused on writing a serious, scholarly blog about seeds, but in the past few days I have found myself continuously distracted by the beauty all around me – the lush sunrises, the stunning orange moonrise -- glowing ever brighter as it rises above the lake and sparkles in its reflection below, the fresh deep snow covering every twig in the forest, the quality of the light through the trees in the early evening hour, the hoar-frost-covered branches suddenly revealing themselves as the fog lifts and the sun catches every shimmering bough, the moon rising just as the sun sets, and the moon setting just as the sun rises.  These windless winter days have been exquisite and make my heart as full as the moon.

Distracted by beauty?  No, it seems rather that the beauty draws me into a truer focus and depth. Distract – from the Latin dis – meaning “away” and trahere – “to draw.” Beauty, far from being dis – tracting, rather “tracts” us, draws us in, directs us to exactly what we need to follow. Strange that the verb “to tract” has become “obsolete.”[i]  We distract, extract, detract, retract – but to “tract” has become old-fashioned, out-of date, passé.  Our lives have become so full of distractions. Our phones ding and chime and alert us to “notifications” – to notice what the phone considers worthy of our attention. The beauty around me these days has caused me to reconsider what I need to notice, to what I need to attend. 

 The line from Rumi, “May the beauty we love become what we do,” keeps reverberating in my mind.  What would that mean?  How can I do this beauty I love? What I’ve noticed in myself is that as I am so filled by the beauty all around me, my capacity for gratitude grows, and as gratitude fills my being, it overflows into joy, into kindness, into compassion. Nor is it enough for me to experience this beauty myself.  I have a deep need to share it.  This is what the Scottish moral sense theorists[ii] considered to be our innate moral sense – that our joy is enhanced, that our experience of beauty and goodness is enhanced when we share it with others. This is what Thomas Jefferson, a moral sense theorist, intended when he counted among our inalienable rights, not the pursuit of property as these rights were originally framed by John Locke[iii], but rather, the pursuit of happiness.  And how did moral sense theorists believe happiness is achieved? By enhancing the happiness of others.  What a different nation we might be if we had not somehow slipped back into the equation of happiness with property that Jefferson deliberately chose not to include, and rather regarded as our deepest inalienable right the right to enhance the happiness of others.[iv]

My Facebook feed the past two days has been filled with photos of the extraordinary sunrises, moonrises, frosted trees, winter beauties  -- everyone wanting to share beauty with the world.  It moves me to tears.  Ah, that we could all live wanting so to enhance each other’s lives with beauty, with joy, with attending to each other’s needs for care and community and rejoicing. 

What is the beauty you want to share with the world?  In the beginning of the book, Let the Beauty We Love Be What We Do,” the collected authors share the beauties they love:

 The beauty I love . . .  is allowing the 10,000-petal flower of my soul to open to its own time and supporting others to do the same/ is hearing the Divine in my soul and others/ lies in the breadth of grandmotherhood/ comes from creating space for others to discover joy in reading/ includes art, nature, and making connections that create beauty/ is living into my call/ is the way simple work, done well, informs the soul/ is interacting with family, friends, and clients in authentic ways/ is seeing others learn and grow/ is quiet mornings/ is laughter of children, the space in silence where the chatter of heart and head can find each other, being a friend to others and to myself.  The beauty I love takes many forms, with one thread in common – that it takes me out of myself and out of time – a simple walk . . . to be on the water in a kayak . . .a phrase on a page . . . a purple finch at the feeder . . . the smell of the seasons just prior to their appearance

What is the beauty you love -- the beauty so intense, so enlivening that it begs to be shared with another – whether a loved one or a stranger, whether the thing of beauty itself or in the kind act, the compassionate heart, the friendly smile, the generous gift of time and attention, the expression of gratitude, the humble bowing down to kiss the ground it inspires in you.

I will eventually finish the blog about seeds, but for today, I am happy to be ‘tracted’ by beauty.

May the beauty we love become what we do.

There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

-          Rumi

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 Sources

Barker, Ernest, ed. 1947. Social Contract: Essays by Locke, Hume, Rousseau.  London: Oxford.

Hare, Sally Z. and Megan Leboutillier, eds. 2014. Let the Beauty We Love Be What We Do: Stories of Living Divide No More. Pawleys Island, South Carolina: Prose Press.

 Rumi, Jalal al-Din.  2004. The Essential Rumi. New York: HarperOne.

 Wills, Garry. 1978. Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. New York: Doubleday. 

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[i] tract - Wiktionary

[ii][ii] Moral sense theory grew out of the Scottish Enlightenment (18th-early 19th century), and argued, among other things, that every person, regardless of sex, race, class has an innate sense of morality, of what is right and wrong.

[iii] English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) first asserted each person’s inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and property” in his Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690).

[iv] It is interesting, in this regard, that “tract” has come to mean a large piece of landed property.

Joy to the World!

♪ Joy to the world . .. ♪-- undoubtedly my mother’s favorite Christmas carol, its jubilant strains marked the official beginning of Christmas when I was a child. On Christmas mornings my brother, sister, and I weren’t allowed to come downstairs from our bedrooms until we heard the music playing.  I was the last of four, and I suppose after more than a dozen years of arising during the pre-dawn hours to children excitedly wanting to open presents, my mom had had enough. However, we would each awake to find a present at the bottom of our beds, and that was enough to placate us until we heard the music.  And then, at last, the trumpets and voices singing, “Joy to the world!” beckoned us down to the living room, with presents piled high under the brightly lit Christmas tree and stockings filled to the brim hung by the roaring fire.  The recordings my dad surreptitiously made with his new reel-to-reel tape recorder are filled with screams and shouts of joy as we tore off wrapping paper and ribbons to discover the hoped-for toy.  I can still hear my brother, Bruce, at the age of six, when he saw the longed-for rocking horse waiting for him in front of the Christmas tree, screaming “Trigger! Trigger!  I got Trigger for my horsie!”

Trigger

It was not until several years later, when I was first given the money and the freedom to roam the downtown department store so I could pick out gifts for others that I discovered another greater joy – the joy of giving.  There would be the usual embroidered handkerchiefs for my grandmother, and the standard clip-on tie for my dad, but for some reason what I remember most was the year I first thought of a gift for my mom on my own and bought her a new set of steak knives. It was something she had wanted, and I was so excited to watch her open it.  After I learned how to knit, I would have the anticipatory joy all the while I was making gifts of hats and socks, scarves and mittens, sweaters and blankets.  This later expanded to baked goods, photo albums and mugs, the written word, and lovingly crafted treasure hunts. These gifts of heart and hand were the most joyous of all.

Yet, somewhere in all the giving and receiving of gifts we appear to have lost the joy of Christmas itself. In recent decades, the purchasing of presents has seemed to become the “reason for the season.” It has even spawned its own named holidays – “Black Friday,” “Super Saturday.” Recently on the evening news, the anchor reported the “good news” that 2022 has surpassed all previous years in the amount of spending people in the US are doing in this “Christmas shopping season.” Has this become the “good news” of Christmas? Are these the glad tidings of great joy foretold by the angels? The commercialization and commodification of Christmas have depotentiated the joy – putting the focus instead on consumption, spending, feeding the capitalist machine, making even Scrooge in his counting house smile.

But the joy of Christmas is far more radical. As a child, I experienced Christmas as a most magical and wonderful time of year, and it wasn’t just about getting presents.   Strangers greeted each other with good cheer, wishing each other a “Merry Christmas.” Children visited the homes of the elderly and housebound, brought them cookies and sang carols.  People were different – kinder, friendlier, more open-hearted, more forgiving. These are the true gifts invoked by the Christmas season, and as a child I often wondered why we couldn’t continue these all year.  I still do. 

It is the question posed by the story of the Christmas truce, when during World War I, the German and British soldiers for a brief time silenced their guns, cannons, and enmity, crossed into no-man’s land, and shared some Christmas cheer.[i]  How could they in one moment share a bit of chocolate and brandy, stories of loved ones at home, play a game of soccer, and sing Christmas carols together – and in the next, shoot and kill each other?  Why couldn’t the friendship and good will continue into the next day and the next and the next?  It begs the question, how would the world of those who profit from war and oppression stay in power if the joy invoked by Christmas continued all year? This is the deeply radicalizing potential of Christmas – of finding our deepest connections, of knowing the joy of which we are capable, of which the world is capable. 

A few weeks ago, I went to visit a dear friend and former college professor of mine.  Garry developed Parkinson’s several years ago, and as he has increasingly lost physical capacities, he has adopted the practice of concluding each day by noting the joys he has experienced that day. The practice helps to sustain in him the kindness and generosity of spirit that I have always known him to exude, even in the midst of the sorrows of loss.  Always the teacher and scholar, he introduced me to the work of poet Ross Gay, and his latest book, Inciting Joy.  In his book, Gay sets about to explore the habits and rituals that make joy more available to us, and certainly Garry’s practice is one of those. 

What, Gay asks, “incites joy?”  As he illustrates throughout his volume, joy is readily available to us all, all the time – whether in a gardener sharing her vegetables, or neighborhood kids enjoying a game of pick-up basketball, or in precious moments of caring for a loved one in their dying. He goes so far as to suggest that joy may be fundamentally “tangled up” with pain and sorrow, that “joy emerges from how we care for each other through those things” (3). Indeed, one of my greatest moments of joy in the past year was after a huge snowstorm when my neighbor, who was plunged through with grief over the sudden and unexpected death of her husband, and I got out the snow tube and raucously slid and spun down the driveway, laughing all the way.  Witnessing her joy amidst her sorrow brought greater joy to my heart than the glorious ride itself. What incites your joy?  It is a question we would all benefit from exploring.

But it is Gay’s second question – what does joy incite? – that is the more provocative.  Incite – to provoke, stir up, arouse – as in, to incite revolution. 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.  . . .” (9). Audre Lorde similarly wrote, “The sharing of joy . . . 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.” (56)  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.

In an interview on CNN, Gay related that as he had become more aware of the ways that institutions and structures have been designed to “enforce destitution,” his questioning of that brought him to recognize the potential of radical joy to counter these systems. 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” (57).  Such joy could empower us to demand of our relationships, our work, our worship, our institutions, and our lives, that they be fulfilling of our deepest purposes, soul-enhancing avenues of self-expression, self-determination, and meaning.[i] Joy incites transformational change.

“…One must keep a freshness and source of joy intact,” wrote Albert Camus. How often have I referenced this passage?  Yet, I have usually focused on the part of the sentence I quoted here. But what grabs my attention now is the first part of the sentence -- “In order for justice not to shrivel up . . .” (168). Joy is essential for the preservation of justice. Is this not, after all, what the glad tidings of Christmas are about – the restoration of justice into a world out of balance and beleaguered by domination; the bringing of love, equity, and mercy to the oppressed; the busting up of hierarchies and the recognition of the divinity in all beings – even a babe born in the humblest of circumstances. Joy incites justice, and justice incites joy. Joy to the world, indeed!

♪And heaven and nature sing!♪

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Sources

Camus, Albert. 1970. Lyrical and Critical Essays.  Ed. and with Notes by Philip Thody. Trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy. NY: Vintage-Knopf.

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

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

Poet Ross Gay on his new book, 'Inciting Joy' - CNN Style

Watts, Isaac. 1719. “Joy to the World” in The Psalms of David: Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, and applied to the Christian state and worship.

Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton U. Press.

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[i] This story was beautifully set to music by John McCutcheon, “Christmas in the Trenches.”

[ii] In thinking about this, I am indebted to Iris Marion Young for her brilliant analysis of oppression and domination, especially in the workplace, in her Justice and the Politics of Difference.

Blizzard!

The wind has been howling all night and snow and ice have covered the windows to the point we can barely see through them. We are sixteen hours into a 48-hour blizzard.  Outside the snow is swirling, blasting the tree trunks so they are completely white and snow-covered on their eastern side. There’s hardly a creature out, though our dog needed walking, and more birds are gathering at the feeder than I’ve seen all winter.  Late last night, I watched a doe and stag walk slowly down the middle of our street, perhaps enjoying the dearth of cars and having a somewhat clear path.  Hopefully they were on their way to some shelter from the warmth.

I wonder about all those without shelter in this storm.  The Warming Center provides a place to get out of the snow and cold to those who are unhoused from 6 PM to 8 AM, but I’m hoping it will stay open all day for the duration of this storm.  The song, “Oh the weather outside is frightful, . . . as long as we’ve no place to go, let it snow!” keeps playing in my mind, and I find myself thinking of those with no place to go to get warm and dry.  I, on the other hand, am fortunate to be inside a cozy warm home, where “in here, it’s so delightful” – a fire blazing in the fireplace, a Christmas tree lit up in good cheer, my dog snuggled up on the couch next to me, plenty of food and all the meds I need, a pile of good books – and no place to go. This morning a friend posted a desperate need for a jigsaw puzzle to ride out this storm, and I even have plenty of those, even a couple new ones.  I feel considerable gratitude to be safe and warm on this blustery day.

Halloween Blizzard 1991

My mind travels back to the Halloween blizzard of 1991.  Our little boy was two, and eager to be out in his red snowsuit with his little red snow shovel, helping his dad shovel the long, steep driveway. (After that blizzard, we went in with the neighbors across the street to get a monster snow blower that we shared for many winters.) I, on the other hand, was stuck inside with a broken heart – literally.  My heart had been damaged years before, most likely by an infection, and it was at the end of its run.  I had an implanted automatic defibrillator that would shock my heart if my heart rate went too high or went into fibrillation, so I waited out those four days before we were plowed out in mild terror that the defibrillator would go off, and I’d be stuck being shocked over and over without access to an ambulance or hospital.  I well remember the relief when finally the roads were plowed, but even more so, the jubilation I felt during the first big storm after my transplant, when I could just go out and play in it.

One winter of several storms, I read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter every night to our young son at bedtime.  Reading the narratives of total whiteout, nearly getting lost in the short distance between the house and the barn, being almost without food toward the end of the winter, and snow upon snow upon snow felt like it was prolonging what had become a seemingly endless winter for us as well.  But again, unlike the Ingalls, we had the gifts of food and warmth.

Thinking of those days of early white settlers in Minnesota, I wondered about how the earlier indigenous peoples of this place endured these storms.  For the Anishinaabe, winter – biboon -- is the time to gather inside and tell stories. In her book, Onigamiising, my friend, Linda LeGarde Grover, wrote that by doing so, they are honoring their ancestors by passing along their spiritual teachings and stories of survival from generation to generation.  She also shared that she had been told that one of the reasons that winter was the story-telling time is that, because some of the stories involve animals who are asleep during the winter, “they won’t hear us talking about them; we are being considerate of their feelings” (160). One of her favorite stories was one about how Gaagoons, the porcupine, scares off bullies with help from Nanaboozhoo.  She said that what she loved about that story is the way Gaagoons maintains his “gentle and kindly ways” after he becomes a great warrior.  The story reminds me of Linda herself, retaining her gentle and kindly ways, even after becoming a great warrior poet.[i]

“Biboon,” she writes, “is a time to appreciate the closeness of home” (147). With the blizzard raging outside, I am appreciating that more on this day than I usually do.  Assuming the power stays on – we are hoping against hope that it does – soon I’ll bake muffins and venture out into the wild with my dog, Ben -- like Gaagoons, braving the bully winds — to take the muffins to a neighbor who is alone for the first time this winter. Later it will be time to break out a new puzzle, make a home-made pizza (though the recipe for a hotdish that Linda shared in her book made me hungry for tuna noodle casserole), perhaps watch a Christmas movie together with my husband, and nestle under the covers, grateful for shelter from the storm, hoping that all – from deer to squirrels to feathered ones and unhoused men, women, and children – also have a warm place to be tonight.

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 Source

Grover, Linda LeGarde. Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

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 [i] Linda LeGarde Grover is a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe and a professor emeritus of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota, Duluth. Her fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction have received the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Wordcraft Circle Award for Fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award.

The Ever-Changing Divine

“My first step from the old white man was trees. . .” – Alice Walker

The image of God presented to me as a child was more of a loving father than an old white man in the sky, but that image was so pervasive in Western culture, I’m sure it gained some sort of symbolic purchase in my understanding of the divine.  I also grew up with the belief that Jesus was both the Son of God and the divine himself. Whether as God or Jesus, the divine definitely was male, and transcendent. The Lord’s Prayer, said weekly in our church, began “Our Father,” and then “who art in heaven,” which in my childhood imaginings must have been in the sky. My favorite hymn as a child was “This Is My Father’s World,” -- definitely God as a father figure, but what I loved most in that hymn were the lines:

 . . . And to my list’ning ears
All nature sings, and round me rings
The music of the spheres.

 . . . I rest me in the thought
Of rocks and trees, of skies and seas—

  . . . The birds their carols raise,
The morning light, the lily white,

 . . . In the rustling grass I hear Him pass,
He speaks to me everywhere.

So perhaps my first step from the Old White Man was indeed the trees, and rocks and birds and seas. I always felt closer to God in the small chapel built in the woods behind our church, on Vesper Hill at the church camp where I was both a camper and counselor and our early Morning Watch when we would begin each day in solitude in the camp woods and meadows, and in childhood moments in cathedrals of pines and baptismal waters of lakes.

But it was not until much later, in the midst of my feminist awakening, that I became aware of writers, scholars, and theologians who spoke to my experience of the divine in nature.  Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance and Matthew Fox’s Original Blessing were circulating in my feminist community at that time.  Both imaged the divine not as male, nor as transcendent, but as God/dess and immanental.  Fox’s panentheism – the divine alive in all things – resonated deeply in me. But it was Carol Christ’s “Rethinking Theology and Nature” that created a paradigm shift in me. Reading her lines, “There are no hierarchies among beings on earth. . .” (321) shattered any remaining illusions I had continued to hold of humans being superior to other animals and animals to plants and plants to rocks and water and soil.  I have walked through the world differently ever since. Her eloquence in describing the intrinsic beauty and value in every being cemented my understanding of the divine as immanental – within all beings on earth and the earth itself.

But the nature of the divine as male still had a foothold in me.  It was Carol Christ’s piece, “Why Women Need the Goddess,” that affirmed my need to immerse myself in the study, language, and invocation of the goddess/es. As Christ wrote, “Because religion has such a compelling hold on the deep psyches of so many people, feminists cannot afford to leave it in the hands of the fathers” (Laughter, 118). That hold is created particularly by the power of the symbolism of the male divinity of God the Father that continues to operate even in those who consider themselves fully secularized.  Christ argued that because religion reaches people at such a deep psychic level and fulfills such important needs to cope with suffering and evil, birth and death, it functions at a symbolic rather than a rational level.  The God the Father symbol continues to have an effect because “…the mind abhors a vacuum.”  She continued, “Symbol systems cannot simply be rejected, they must be replaced. Where there is not any replacement, the mind will revert to familiar structures at times of crisis, bafflement, or defeat” (Laughter, 118). Her piece gave me the permission and the motivation I needed to replace all references to God as male, father, lord, and king with goddess as female, mother, and sister within in language and imagery, and as recipient of my prayers.

Venus of Willdendorf

Hildegard of Bingen’s Illumination

I changed the male language in every hymn I sang and every prayer I spoke. At feminist spirituality conferences, with hundreds of other women, I invoked, “The earth is my sister, I must take care of her.” With Starhawk, I danced the Spiral Dance, chanting, “She changes everything she touches, and everything she touches changes.”  Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade introduced me to the thousands of years of goddess-worshipping cultures that lived in peace and partnership and celebrated the feminine divine.  I immersed myself in the study of these cultures and the feminine divine, in the goddess imagery found throughout the world, in contemporary goddess chants and medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen’s music and art celebrating the feminine divine. I discovered and embraced as well the feminine divine within my own Judaeo-Christian religious upbringing – the Jewish Shekinah and the Christian Sophia or Wisdom. To read descriptions of these figures of the feminine divine was transformational for me, enabling me, in the words of Ntozake Shange to find “. . .  God in myself, and I loved Her, I loved Her fiercely” (63).

 Shekinah is She Who Dwells Within/The force that binds and patterns creation . . . Shekinah is Changing Woman, Nature herself/Her own Law and Mystery/She is cosmos, dark hole, fiery moment of beginning./She is dust cloud, nebulae, the swirl of galaxies/She is gravity, magnetic field,/The paradox of waves and particles. . . . Creatrix of complex systems/Expanding, contracting, spiraling, meandering/The beginning of Wisdom. – from the Kabbalah (Gottlieb,26-27)

Wisdom, the artificer of all, taught me. For in her is a spirit, intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, agile, clear, unstained, certain, not baneful, loving the good, keen unhampered, beneficent, kindly, firm, secure, tranquil, all-powerful, all-seeing, and pervading all spirits, though they be intelligent, pure and very subtle. Indeed she reaches from end to end mightily and governs all things well. Wisdom: 7: 22-23

 The words parallel those of Paula Gunn Allen: There is a spirit that pervades everything. . . . She appears on the plains, in the forests, in the great canyons, on the mesas, beneath the seas. To her we owe our very breath. . . . She is the true Creatrix  . . . She is the necessary precondition for material creation, and she, like all of her creation, is fundamentally female – potential and primary (22).

Black Madonna of Czestochowska

China Galland expanded my notion of the feminine divine through her exploration of the Buddhist Tara -- the very essence of compassion, and the veneration of the Black Madonna, inspiring thousands to travel in pilgrimage to various shrines to her throughout Europe to this very day. Galland described this as “longing for darkness” which, she said, is to long “for transformation, for a darkness, that brings balance, wholeness, integration, wisdom, insight” (152).  Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza said the same of the original followers of Jesus -- that in the early Jesus movement, Jesus’s disciples understood Jesus as one of a long line of prophets of Sophia sent to bring back balance, and restore wisdom, mercy, kindness, and justice. The world is sorely in need of the rebalancing energy of the feminine divine.

 But my conception of the divine did not settle here. Carol Christ continued to push my thought. Her She Who Changes caused yet another paradigm shift in me.  In it, Christ systematically explored what Charles Hartshorne identified as the six theological mistakes of classical theism: 1) God is perfect and unchangeable; 2) omnipotence, 3) omniscience, 4) God’s unsympathetic goodness, 5) immortality; and 6) revelation as infallible. While I was in complete agreement with her arguments that the divine is not omnipotent, omniscient, nor unsympathetic, the notion of divine as changeable rocked my world.  It both made sense and no sense at all.  Wasn’t the divine this one constant in the world – this unceasing loving presence?  And yet, as is so often said, the only constant in life is change itself.[i]  Hadn’t my own conception and connection with the divine changed so many times in my lifetime?  The notion of the divine as “she who changes” was at once unsettling and expansive.  The more I pondered, the more liberating it felt to understand the divine as always in process, allowing for becoming.  At the time I read She Who Changes, I had only recently become aware of the process philosophy in which Christ based her work, but for years I had been engaging in process psychology. “Trust the process,” my therapist would say.  I had learned to put my faith in the process.  Was this not the notion of the divine as changing – trusting that the process would bring me to the divine within? 

Yet Christ also described her own experience of the divine as “always there” (Christ & Plaskow, 261). In being with her mother in her dying, Christ had discovered “that a great matrix of love had always surrounded and supported my life” (Rebirth, 4.) Her words gave expression to my own experience. Christ explained this constancy of the changing divine through Hartshorne’s concept of “dual transcendence” -- that while the divine is always in a process of change, co-creating with a changing world, the nature of the divine remains the same. In this, which I believe would more appropriately be called “transcendence in immanence” or “immanence in transcendence,” Christ succeeded in breaking and blending the very dualisms she had sought to transform.[ii]

My understanding of the divine now is fluid – a loving presence, an energy uplifting and supporting me and life on earth and in the universe, the divine spark within all of life – as constant as the sun rising each day and as changeable as each sunrise is from day to day and moment to moment.

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Sources

Allen, Paula Gunn. 1989. “Grandmother of the Sun: The Power of Woman in Native America.” In Plaskow, Judith and Carol P. Christ. Weaving the Visions: 22-28.

Babcock, Maltie D. 1901. “This Is My Father’s World.”

Christ, Carol P. 1987. Laughter of Aphrodite: Reflections on a Journey to the Goddess.  San Francisco: Harper & Row.

______. 1997. Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality.  New York, Routledge.

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

______.  2003. She Who Changes: Re-Imagining the Divine in the World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Christ, Carol P. and Judith Plaskow. 2016. Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Eisler, Riane. 1988. The Chalice & The Blade: Our History: Our Future. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Fiorenza, Elizabeth Schussler. 1984. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. New York: Crossroad Press.

Fox, Matthew. 1983. Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality Presented in Four Paths, Twenty-Six Themes, and Two Questions. Santa Fe: Bear & Co.

Galland, China. 1990.  Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna.  New York: Penguin.

Gottlieb, Lynn. 1995. She Who Dwells Within: A Feminist Vision of a Renewed Judaism. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.

Plaskow, Judith and Carol P. Christ. 1989. Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.

Shange, Ntozake. 1975. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf. New York: Scribner.

Starhawk. 1979. The Spiral Dance. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

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

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[i] This saying is first attributed to the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus. Who Said "the Only Thing Constant Is Change"? (reference.com)

[ii] See especially her Rebirth of the Goddess, 98-104.

Watershed Moments

“ . . . turning points, from which things will never be the same.”[i]

 It had been raining for two days and nights, and the gale force winds were gusting to forty and fifty miles per hour.  As I started out walking the trail with my dog, Ben, a friend and his dog were just leaving. Nellie and Ben greeted each other, as did Sam and I. We were the only ones out in this gale. Sam told me how a friend, when he found out Sam was out hiking in this, told him he was “possessed.”  We laughed and went on our separate ways, though I would later reflect that indeed he was, we were, possessed of the unexpected gifts of being out in this weather.

The trail runs along Amity Creek, and the Amity was about as high as I’ve ever seen it, gushing and gurgling, overflowing its banks, making waterfalls where before there were just logs and rocks. As I rounded a corner, I came face-to-face with a 6-point buck, just twenty feet in front of me.  I suppose he and I should have both been startled, but instead we just exchanged looks for a moment, the buck looking a bit bewildered by the howling winds and the changed creek, as if to say, “Can you help me find my way?” I gave him space so as not to alarm him, and he turned and ambled down to the creek bank, clearly wondering how he could possibly get to the other side.  He paced up and down looking for a place to cross, and finally gave into the fact that he could no longer easily walk across it, and needed to swim.  After I watched him safely reach the other side, we walked on. At the confluence of the main branch and the east branch of the Amity the water was especially high. There we encountered two does on the trail, and two more on the other side, wandering, looking disoriented, seeming confused that there was now a rushing river where the day before they could easily step across the creek. I wondered if, like so many affected by the floods and storms of climate change, they, too, had lost their home. I hope they found their way.

With the waters so high, it seemed a good day to search for the rest of the east branch of the Amity. I’d been aware of its existence, having seen where it joins the main creek countless times, but never thought much about it until the “Rewilding” course I’m taking invited me to reflect on my relationship with the watershed where I live.[ii] I’ve appreciated how in the part of Michigan where I’ve spent many summers, signs along the roadsides indicate when one is entering a different watershed, but here I needed to go in search of it. Fortunately, our city has mapped the watersheds of all 43 of the named streams here, and as I had thought, I live in the Amity watershed.[iii]  It’s my favorite of the many streams in Duluth, and like its name, feels like my friend.  I’ve walked different sections of it nearly every day for over forty years, and yet when I looked at the map of the watershed, I was surprised to learn of all of the Amity I’ve never seen, just as we’re often surprised when learning things we’d never known about long-time friends.  I’ve never once traversed any part of the east branch, nor even seen where it flows.

But now I was ready to set out to explore this creek I had thought I knew so well.  I’ve driven this main road countless times without ever seeing it.  But now, looking for it, I spotted it well below the surface of the road.  I never would have seen it had I not been looking.  Witch, permaculturist, and author Starhawk taught me this lesson. As I drove her around Duluth on one of her return visits to her hometown, I remarked that I thought she had gotten her vision in her book, The Fifth Sacred Thing, of busting up the roads so the streams could run free, from memories of growing up here where parks, rather than the urban grid, had been built around free-running rivers and streams – Lester Park, Chester Park, Keene Creek Park, Lincoln Park.  She queried, “Are you sure the streams aren’t culverted?,” just as we drove over the place where Chester Creek is culverted under 4th Street.  She continued talking about how so much of the wild water has been hidden from view, channeled, buried, diverted to human use.  Losing sight of it, we lose knowledge of it, and subsequently, also no longer care for it. What we can’t see, we can’t know, and what we can’t know, we can’t love. And now, here again, I found that the east branch of the Amity was channeled into a culvert under the road.

Nevertheless, I was quite excited to have found it.  The watershed map showed me other roads it crosses, or I should say, that it is culverted under, and I was in search of it.  Driving on West Tischer, I peered along the sides of the road – Ah, there it is!   I was excited to have found where it flows on either side of the road, and then again on Arnold, and soon found myself exploring up and down the maze of mostly rural roads in the Amity watershed. I could hardly contain my excitement as I discovered the winding path of the Amity and explored this whole other part of the Amity watershed.  In a true watershed moment, I felt connected to these lands in a way I hadn’t before. Like finding a whole part of a family tree of which one had no previous knowledge, here I had found so many new relations.

This was the point of the watershed exercise after all – to grow our sense of connection, physical and spiritual, with the many neighbors in the watershed where we live – those who live here and share this water – the chickadees, snowshoe hares, deer, beaver, squirrels, spiders, bracken fern, goldenrod, aspen, birch, cedar, oak, white pine, crows, trout, frogs, mallards – we are all connected.  I feel an expansive awareness of kin as I consider the ways in which the stream connects us all.

In my process of discovery, I learned that the Amity is considered the west branch of the Lester River, and so my sense of my watershed expanded.  Because the Lester and Amity flow into Lake Superior, I searched as well for maps of the Lake Superior watershed. I was surprised how far west into Minnesota that watershed extends – deep into mining country where for years a distant corporation with no immediate connection to this watershed has wanted to build a copper-nickel mine that would threaten all of the many waters in this great watershed that links all of us in Canada, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. We are bound together through our common source.  From this I expanded the search to the St. Lawrence watershed, extending our community through Canada and all of the Great Lakes to the Atlantic.  I found nothing when I searched for the Atlantic watershed, which of course would include the eastern parts of the Americas and the western parts of Europe and Africa, and even this is too limited, for the division of the waters of the world into six named oceans is arbitrary, since actually they all join together in one body of water.

Here it is -- the ultimate watershed moment – the recognition that all the ways we have divided ourselves from each other -- by boundaries of state and nation; constructs of race; religious and political beliefs; constructed binaries of body/mind, male/female, human/nature – are artificial and arbitrary. What affects one affects all. Like the culverted waters, we just haven’t been able to see it, but as the waters of the world show us, we are all our relations – kin in this great watershed of the world. 

The high falls on the Amity in Lester Park.

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References

Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing. New York: Bantam, 1993.

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[i] Watershed moment Idiom Definition (grammarist.com)

[ii] The course is “Wild Seasons: A Year-Long Rewilding Journey,” created by Mary DeJong. Waymarkers.

[iii] Lake Superior Streams - The Streams. The city also provides so much other information about the watershed – the water chemistry and quality, stressors, issues, history, land use, and more. I learned that 2% of the Amity watershed is “urban use” – the grocery store, hardware store, and a few scattered other shops; another 2% is “developed rural” – probably the neighborhood where I live and a few others. The rest is forest, grassland, and wetlands. Just 1% of it is the creek itself.  I’m sad to learn that the condition of the Amity is “impaired,” apparently because of murky water, though everywhere I look, it seems crystal clear. When I click on “History,” expecting to find the history of the creek itself, or perhaps of the indigenous people who lived here for thousands of years, I’m disappointed to learn that the only history is of white men’s development of the nine stone-arch bridges that cross the lower sections of the creek.

Why Write?

On November 5th, I just happened to click on the first blog post I wrote, and discovered that it was the anniversary of my first post. That made me wonder about all that I had thought and written about over the past year.  Had I fulfilled what I had set out to do?  As I read through all that I had said I would be writing about, I realized that I had touched on many, though not all.  The blog has evolved in surprising ways.  I never thought I would write so much about snow!  Nor did I anticipate so many “In Memoriam” pieces.  We have lost so many bright lights this past year. 

Why write?  I’ve wondered about that often.  As I stated in the original post in this blog, in some ways it began with my question upon retiring from life as a professor of what to do with all this accumulated knowledge. My friend, Babette, gave me my answer with her insight that I would continue to do my work, but out in the world.   

That world closed to me in March 2020. On International Women’s Day that year, I was out doing my work in the world, giving a guest sermon at our local Unitarian Church.  One of the congregants announced that he and his wife would not be seeing them for a while. They had been storing up food and supplies to isolate for the next few months because of the rumors of Covid spreading to the US.  At that time, I thought they were being very extreme.  Four days later I began my own isolation which continues to this day.  Being immunosuppressed and a transplant recipient put me at extreme risk in those early days of Covid.  When the vaccines came out, and people first started moving back out into the world, I discovered that I was not making antibodies in response to the vaccine. Even when I lowered my immunosuppressants and began having an antibody response several months and a third dose later, experts told us they couldn’t be sure of how our T and B cells were responding,[i] and to continue isolating. 

Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use” has often gone through my mind these past two plus years:

The people I love the best

jump into work head first. . . .  

. . . do what needs to be done, again and again. 

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task. . . . 

The pitcher cries for water to carry

And a person for work that is real. 

I want to be the person who does what needs to be done, who submerges in the task; I am the person who cries for work that is real. When the pandemic began, I longed to be in the thick of things, and to have the requisite medical skills to care for the sick and the dying, and to do what I could to bring healing and comfort. I hungered to be in the makeshift food distribution centers, preparing meals, providing sustenance. When George Floyd was murdered, I wanted to be out on the streets marching. When Enbridge built Line 3 through pristine wild rice lakes, I ached to be in the lines of resistance, and to offer the trauma healing I had trained for for this very moment. I yearned to be available to care for my sister as she grows older, and for my newborn grand niece and nephew, and to celebrate and mourn with others at gatherings, feasts, weddings, funerals. But being immunosuppressed, in what for those like me is an ongoing pandemic, has rendered me mostly useless in the ways I normally would engage in the tasks at hand out in the world.

And so, I write -- hoping that somewhere, sometime, someone will find these words to be of use.

Beyond feeling of use in the world, writing feeds my soul and my need for creativity and intellectual stimulation.  I only recently realized that’s it also a way that I play -- with words, ideas, photos. Creating these posts is fun for me. 

It also only recently occurred to me that I’m creating these as a legacy to my son and to those yet unborn offspring – in case they wonder someday, as I have, about their grandmother, or in generations to come, their great or great great grandmother – who she was; what she thought about; what she did with her life.  In the midst of Covid and with turning 70, the thought of leaving something to those who come after me has been more present in my mind.  I have wanted to pass down the wisdom that was handed to me.  I regard it as a sort of trust – not something to be hoarded or to dissolve into the ether when I do -- but rather something to be given away, passed along, paid forward.  

As I begin to create the documents that will let others know my wishes regarding the distribution of my estate after my death, it is curious to me that my assets are reckoned only in terms of financial wealth. The online estate planning site asks me: What kind of assets will the Trust hold?  Who are your beneficiaries and what is your relationship to them? Who will be your trustee? I ponder these questions in terms of putting my thoughts to paper.

What kind of assets will the trust hold? The wisdom of so many, my thoughts and ideas, the wealth of the accumulation of knowledge of a long-lived life steeped in books, yes, but also the wisdom of experience, and of so many teachers, chief among them the earth – the wisdom of water and wind, of mushrooms, moss, and muskrats. I hope that it may also hold music and song; an appreciation for sunrises and Superior, rocks and waterfalls; the kinship of dogs; and most of all a full treasure chest of love.  May that love come through my words.

Who will my beneficiaries be?  My first thought is that I bequeath these words to my child and his soon-to-be-born son, and others who come after, whom I hope will benefit from them in some small way in years to come.  But from the outset my hope and intention in writing have been that it is of benefit to those who read it, whether in pleasure in the reading, or fodder for thought, or a new perspective, or a recognition of the appreciation I feel towards all who take the time.  I don’t know where and with whom my words land.  I have been surprised at times by those unknown to me who have picked it up, passed it on.  Who knows who the beneficiaries will be? I could not begin to designate them.

What is your relationship to them? One of trust and respect, appreciation and gratitude. Were it not for the relationship assumed and forged in this writing, these would simply be jottings in a journal seen only by me. So, I would hope the relationship is honorable, in Adrienne Rich’s use of the term “honorable relationship” – one of refining the truths we can share, that does justice to our complexity, and that I am eager, longing for the possibility of extending the possibilities of truth between us.[ii]   

Who will be the trustee? I entrust these words to any and all who would partake of them, to take from them whatever is useful and good, and to pass along to others in their circles of love, learning, and care.

In her reflections on consumption in Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer ponders the question, “Is what I’m writing worthy of the tree consumed in the creation of this piece of paper?” – or in this case, the fossil fuels burned to power the internet servers.[iii] What makes the writing a gift of reciprocity, worthy of the life of the tree?  My heart responds — that it is honest, heartfelt, truthful and truth-telling; that it honors the questions, opens to possibilities; that it invites conversation, widens perspectives, illuminates, challenges and occasionally discomfits; that it also is uplifting, inspiring, embraces wonder, brings joy. For my writing to be worthy it needs as well to be “right speech”[iv] – not harmful, cruel, abusive, malicious, or hateful, but rather benevolent, respectful, and meaningful. It also needs to be clear and accessible -- democratic in that sense. It matters to me that it speaks to others, perhaps touches something universal, and finally, that it be beautiful. 

If in some way these words have done any of this for you reading them, then I am glad.  It’s been an honor to share my thoughts with you.  Thank you to those who have shared yours in response, or have simply told me how you appreciate the writings. I look forward to continuing the conversation.

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 Sources

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

Piercy, Marge. Circles on the Water.  New York: Knopf, 1982.

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

Testamentary Trust vs Living Trust: What's the Difference? (trustandwill.com)

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[i] Antibodies are just one part of an effective response to vaccines.  The B (memory) cells and the T (killer) cells also need to be primed to go into action if the virus is detected.

[ii] From Rich’s essay, “On Women and Honor,” 188 & 194. In her closing words: “It [the honorable relationship] means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us.” 194.

[iii] See particularly her chapters on” Wiisgaak Gokpanagen” and “The Honorable Harvest.”

[iv] “Right Speech” is the third step on the Buddhist Eight-Fold Path.

Remembering The Burning Times

I first saw it when looking at their faces while showing The Burning Times in class -- the blank stares, the pained expressions, the tears, the looking away. The scenes and sounds of women tortured and burned alive touched something deep and ancient in my students.  Here it was -- the historical and inter- and transgenerational trauma of women.[i] The lasting impact of historical trauma is experienced by subsequent generations for hundreds of years, manifesting in such things as depression, PTSD, self-destructive behaviors, anger, violence, suicide, and more. As Native LGBTQ activist and writer Chris Stark so eloquently put it:  “The experiences of our grandparents and great-grandparents are written into the library of our bodies . . . .My ancestors’ loss and screams are written in me – their pain and murder and rape merged with my own as a child. . . We carry them through time. We remember.”  

It is so important that the historical trauma of Native, African American, and Jewish peoples is finally being acknowledged and addressed. More recently attention has been given to the historical trauma of Japanese Americans and other people of color, LGBTQ, immigrant, and impoverished populations as well. However, rarely are women as a group considered a targeted population, despite the ongoing trauma of living under patriarchy, the vast amounts of intimate partner violence and sexual assault, and the hundreds of years of the European witch burnings, dubbed by Andrea Dworkin “gynocide,” and its impact on indigenous women as Europeans colonized the globe.

During this time of the Celtic and Wiccan holiday of Samhain, the Christian Halloween, All Saint’s Day and All Soul’s Day, and the Mexican Día de los Muertos, it seems fitting to reflect on the historical trauma of descendants of “the burning times” – the hundreds of years from the 13th to the 18th centuries in which vast numbers of the peasant populations of northern Europe were accused of witchcraft, imprisoned, tortured, and burned alive. The estimates of the numbers of those killed varies from sixty thousand to nine million, but that about 85% of these were women is undisputed. “Were there two million or nine million witches burned?” asks Susan Griffin. “Whatever the number, we must imagine a conflagration, a mass terror, the constant odor of burning flesh, whole villages massacred, children whipped or thrown on the flames with their mothers” (Pornography, 80).

Poor women, wise women, healers, widows, spinsters – women living outside of patriarchal authority – were most vulnerable to charges of witchcraft. “Whilst not all women were the target of accusations,” Enya Holland pointed out, “it can be argued that ‘anomalous’ women were.” And it can be said, as Mary Daly did, that “the torture and burning of women as witches became normal and indeed normative in ‘Renaissance’ Europe” (201).

Why women? Historian Irving Smith believed it was because more women than men survived the plague, and the women healers and wise women were a threat to authorities, the Church, and the male medical profession. In her Dreaming the Dark, Starhawk provides a thoughtful discussion of the possible reasons, including the expropriation of the knowledge of the midwives and healers by the rising medical profession, but also what she called “the war against the consciousness of immanence, which was embodied in women, sexuality, and magic” (189).  An aspect of this latter, and the one that I and others believe factored most heavily, was due to the Church’s association of women with the devil. That the Church considered women to be in league with the devil dated back to Tertullian in the 2nd Century CE who wrote of women, "You are the gateway of the devil; . . .  Woman, you are the gate to hell."[ii]   But it was with the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum by two Jesuit priests in 1486 that the association of women with witchcraft reached unparalleled levels.  “All wickedness is but little to the wickedness of a woman. . . she is more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations. . . . All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable. For the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort even with devils.. . . “

It became widely believed that “witches copulated with the devil, rendered men impotent. . . devoured newborn babies, poisoned livestock,  . . . ” (Eherenreich & English, 35) As midwives and healers, they also engaged in acts, once considered important aspects of the healing professions, but at that time rendered criminal – contraception, abortion, and delivering babies without pain. And so it was easy to make women, especially women living outside male authority, scapegoats for the Black Plague and the poverty of peasant populations forced off their lands. 

As Susan Griffin recognized, “. . . these deaths were only the climax of a series of events. For the witches were arrested first, and then put on trial, they were bound up and tortured and told to give evidence against themselves. . . .” In order extort confessions, the accused were “. . . hung upside down, beaten with whips and mallets, their fingernails were pulled out, they were put on a rack which violently stretched the body, a tortillon squeezed the ‘tender parts,’ . . . “ (Pornography, 80.) Torturers applied thumb screws to the victims’ fingers and toes, and shin screws pressed to the point that their shins would splinter into pieces. If the accused did not confess with the first level of torture, a second would be applied, and if not then, then the torturers employed the third degree in which all would confess.

 That the torture was so sexual in nature must be stressed. While imprisoned, the accused would be stripped and most likely raped by the torturer’s assistants.[iii] They would be forced to face the priests, jailers, judges, torturers, and executioners -- all of whom were men -- naked.[iv] Their bodies were routinely searched for the “devil’s mark.” Torturers applied hot fat and tongs to the accused’s eyes, armpits, breasts, and vaginas.[v] Mary Daly asserted that, “a witch was forced to relieve her torture by confessing that she acted out the sexual fantasies of her male judges as they described these to her,” presuming that they “ . . . achieved erotic gratification from her torture, from the sight of her being stripped and gang raped,  . . .  and from her spiritual and physical slow death” (214).

How could this trauma not be felt and passed on for generations of women to come? As Resmaa Menakem notes, for centuries white bodied people passed this trauma on to other white bodied people, before inflicting it on indigenous and enslaved bodies in the Americas. The historical trauma of Europeans has spread throughout the globe as Europeans colonized much of the rest of the world, bringing their trauma and tactics with them. Menakem, however, lacks a gendered analysis, failing to note that certain sexualized brutality was specific to women.  The same tactics of sexualized violence and torture of women accused of witchcraft would be inflicted on Native and enslaved women in North America, as they would be on Jewish women during the Holocaust and colonized populations of indigenous women around the globe.[vi]

The lasting impact of this historical trauma continues today in the silence, passivity, and internalized oppression of women, for somewhere ancient in our bodies we carry a fear that to speak out, to be visible, to claim space in the world is to risk imprisonment, torture, and death. The trauma continues as well as in ongoing tactics of sexual terrorism used to frighten, dominate, control, and silence. It lives on in pornography that mirrors the witch trial tortures, in sexual and domestic violence, in sex trafficking, and in ongoing efforts to prevent women’s sexual and reproductive autonomy through bans on contraception and abortion and threats to imprison and murder those who would assist a woman in these.

The effects of the burning times are still with us. I can feel this in my own body. As Starhawk put it so vividly, “the smoke of the burned witches still hangs in our nostrils, . . . remind[ing] us to see ourselves as separated. . . in competition with each other, alienated, powerless and alone” (219). However, she continues, “the struggle also continues.”  That struggle is the impulse toward wholeness, healing.  That journey toward healing begins with remembering and acknowledging past harms, so that we may better understand who we are and the ways these continue to live in our bodies, psyches, and culture in order to address them.

In South American indigenous cultures, trauma is recognized as susto, or “soul wound,” and it is on that level that healing needs to happen.[vii]  To quote Shirley Turcotte, “Healing from trauma is a spiritual matter, a relationship matter, and there are places in recovery that require a precious spiritual response.”[vii]i The women’s spirituality movement that burgeoned in the 1970s and 1980s continues to be one such precious response The work of Starhawk and others to reclaim the word “witch” and to revive and reimagine a tradition of valuing immanence, the sacredness of the earth, and the ability to change the world for the good has been invaluable in this.[ix]  In their efforts to reform and re-envision the predominant male-centered world religions, feminist theologians have also made steps toward healing the aspects of those traditions that have been so damaging. In their revival of ancient goddess worship, Carol Christ and others have worked to restore the energy and sacredness of the feminine divine to a broken world so in need of this.

As we learn more about the ways trauma lives in our bodies and our very cells, other paths of healing are opened, and we are learning how to metabolize and discharge ancient traumas.[x] A few years ago, Tina Olson, then director of Mending the Sacred Hoop,[xi] told me that as they were seeing patterns stemming from past abuses repeating in the next generations, they were shifting the focus of their work from the criminal justice system to healing. They were providing trauma-informed care that engaged women in healing at their own pace in a way that is more traditional, and takes into account their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual healing. At that time, I had little idea of what that entailed until I had the privilege, through Mending the Sacred Hoop, to be trained to offer such healing practices through Indigenous Focusing Oriented Trauma (IFOT) therapy. It was an incredible honor to learn from indigenous elders from British Columbia, as well as from those in my training cohort.  Even though I had already trained in Somatic Experiencing® trauma therapy, this decolonized approach completely altered my worldview and sense of the space-time continuum. I learned that the “felt sense” in each of us “is our teacher and our natural way to spiritually connect with our ancestors and to connect with all of life and land” (Turcotte & Schiffer, 61). The indigenous approach recognizes all our relations, and that the medicine may reveal itself in a dragonfly, a stone, in cedar, or the waters of Gichi Gami. I distinctly remember Shirley Turcotte (the founder of IFOT) saying that first day, “All time is now.”  It was only through immersion in the practices that I came to understand that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, so that in healing in the present, we are also healing the trauma of our ancestors, and that of generations to come. Similarly, in the course of the practices, often healing would come through the assistance and wisdom of an ancestor.  As Turcotte said, healing from intergenerational trauma requires moving between dimensions with kindness and grace. I know this healing to be possible.

At this time of year, as we honor and restore our relations with our ancestors, with each other, and the earth, I am reminded of the words of Susan Griffin, “The earth holds a vast wisdom and a capacity to heal that we are only beginning to comprehend. We are made from this earth. This is my hope” (Made from this Earth, 20).

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 Sources

Barstow, Anne L.  Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts. New York: Harper One, 1995.

Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon, 1978.

Duran, Eduardo. Healing the Soul Wound: Counseling with American Indians and Other Native Peoples.  New York: Teachers College Press, 2006.

Dworkin, Andrea. Woman Hating. New York: Plume, 1975.

Ehrenreich, Barbara & Deirdre English. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women.  New York: Anchor Books, 1979.

Elkins, Caroline. Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022.

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

______. Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature.  New York: Harper, 1981.

Holland, Enya. “The European Witchhunts: A Mass Murder of Women?” The York Historian blog. March 11, 2017. The European Witch Hunts: A Mass Murder of Women? | The York Historian

Kramer, Heinrich and James Sprenger. Malleus Maleficarum.  Trans. Montague Summers. Dover, 1971.

Manaley, Anita. “Cultural and Historical Trauma.” Webinar. Somatic Experiencing International.

Menakem, Resmaa. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017.

Olson, Tina. Personal Interview. October 16, 2014.

Smith, Andrea. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Cambridge: South End Press, 2005.

Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics. Fifteenth Anniversary Ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997.

Stark, Chris. “Healing: Generational Trauma.” Minnesota Women’s Press, 2017.

Tertullian, De Cultu Feminarum, (On the Apparel of Women) Sec. 1.1, part 2.

The Burning Times. Directed by Donna Read. National Film Board of Canada. 1990.

Turcotte, Shirley  & Jeffrey J. Schiffer. “Aboriginal Focusing Oriented Therapy (AFOT), in Emerging Practice in Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy.  Jessica Kingsley Publishers: 55-74.

Turcotte, Shirley. “Aboriginal Focusing Oriented Therapy and Relational Consideration of Unresolved Trauma.”

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 [i] Intergenerational trauma occurs when the trauma experienced by someone(s) is passed down epigenetically, psychologically, and physiologically to the next generation, and becomes transgenerational when the trauma continues to be passed down to subsequent generations. Historical trauma is more sweeping – mass trauma deliberately and systematically inflicted by a subjugating power to a targeted group over an extended period of time (Manalay, Menakem).

[ii] Tertullian was a 2nd century Christian author considered by some to be the father of Western theology.

[iii] Daly citing Rossell Hope Robbins, 201-202.

[iv] Thea Jensen, in The Burning Times.

[v] Barstow, Witchcraze.

[vi] In her book, Conquest, Andrea Smith makes a similar argument regarding the sexualized violence inflicted on Native and African American women.

[vii] See Duran, Eduardo. Healing the Soul Wound.

[viii] Turcotte, “Aboriginal Focusing Oriented Therapy.” Turcotte is the founder of Indigenous Focusing-Oriented Trauma therapy and with other wise elders holds trainings in IFOT throughout Canada and a few places in the United States.

[ix] See, for example, Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance; Dreaming the Dark; and The Earth Path.

[x] In his My Grandmother’s Hands, Menakem provides excellent insights, exercises, and somatic tools to metabolize, discharge, and heal these ancient wounds.

[xi] Mending the Sacred Hoop, based in Duluth, MN, is the primary Training and Technical Assistance provider on domestic abuse intervention and healing for tribes in Indian Country.

Breathtaking

At some point on my drive, I realized that I was so enraptured by the beauty all around me that I had stopped breathing.  The trees were breathtaking.  Not a mere figure of speech, this must be where the term originated – that one’s breath is literally taken when overwhelmed by beauty.  From a somatic perspective, one’s breath and heart rate slow as the parasympathetic nervous system is activated.  Perhaps I was in a place of such perfect peace and calm that I barely needed to breathe.

In recent years, I’ve often driven the length of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a mostly hidden gem of autumnal glory, during peak color season. The trees along the roadside are a perfectly balanced artist’s array of scarlets, ambers, golds, oranges, greens, and browns. At various points along the way lush expanses of the Porcupine and Huron mountains emerge in full color as does the deep blue of Lake Superior.  It is a total immersion experience that unfolds every mile for eight continuous hours.

As I drive, I listen to music as exquisite as the leaves -- my mother’s favorite album — Great Performances of The New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein: Ralph Vaughn Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Fantasia on Greensleeves, Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No. 1 in D Major, Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in C Sharp Minor, and Barber’s Adagio for Strings.  The Adagio was my mother’s favorite for the way it causes the soul to leap in an exquisite arc of melody.  Whenever it was playing on the hi-fi, she would drop whatever she was doing, come find us and make us stop and listen as the strings soared to what seemed to be the pinnacle. We would hold our breath in anticipation as they climbed yet again higher, lingering long, and then exhale as they descended to their denouement. Breathtaking.

The harmonies of hues and tones carry me along as I drive by vivid vistas and lazuline lakes. As I make the turn high above Munising, a small harbor town surrounded by high hills on three sides and Lake Superior on the other, I find myself near tears so overcome am I by the splendor. The hills surrounding the town are ablaze in color, contrasting with the deep blue of Lake Superior.  Enveloped and enraptured, I am overcome with gratitude. It was here several years before that I had discovered the capacity of beauty to heal.

That year I was on sabbatical to complete work on a book.  It was also a needed time away from years of being embroiled in academic politics.  With ever-increasing budget cuts, morale at our university was low.  Our department of Women’s Studies had always had to fight for our existence, but this last had been an especially difficult year.  The battles, callousness, and pettiness had sucked the life out of me and I’d grown cynical and hard. I hardly recognized myself.  I didn’t like who I’d become, and feared that I was forever changed.

Lake of the Clouds, Porcupine Mountains

But that fall, as I first made that drive across the UP with my dog, Charlie, with each passing mile I could feel the crustiness fall away.  We stopped for a hike in the Porcupine Mountains and drove that gorgeous stretch of road along Lake Superior from the Porkies to Ontonagon before turning inland through the Ottawa National Forest where we were blanketed in all possible shades of greens, golds, yellows, reds, burgundies, and bright oranges. By the time I made that turn into Munising, I was weeping not only from the sheer beauty, but from realizing that the hard core of cynicism that had encased my spirit was gone, and that I had come back to myself, a self that knew a capacity for goodness, joy, and deep gratitude.

In the years of suffering from cardiomyopathy before my heart transplant, I had tried all varieties of self-healing techniques and knew well the healing capacities of various colors. [i]  Red induces vitality and counters depression. Yellow is cheering.  The deep blue of sky and sea calms the body and soul, and can even reduce blood pressure and heart rate. Both green and orange are especially noted for their healing qualities —stimulating growth, renewal, joy, and happiness. Perhaps I’d simply immersed myself in hours of color therapy, but this felt deeper, a metanoia, a true change of heart.

I had begun that particular drive by re-listening to an On Being podcast of Krista Tippett’s interview with Robin Wall Kimmerer that I had first heard earlier that year on MPR. I had been captivated by Kimmerer, and her braiding together of indigenous wisdom with scientific knowledge.  I was particularly drawn to her fascination with beauty, an intrigue I shared. I’d wondered often about beauty and its relation to truth, goodness, and justice. I found myself pondering beauty as I drove, unaware until that moment in Munising that I was, as Rilke suggested, living the question, and that “gradually, without even noticing it,” I had lived my way into the answer.[ii] 

I’ve made this trip almost every year since that time, an important soul renewal in a world that has grown increasingly harsh with hate-filled politics, war, gun violence, racial strife, a stripping away of the rights of women and LGBTQ folk, a global pandemic, and a quickly degrading climate.  This time I interspersed the music with an audio version of Kimmerer reading her Braiding Sweetgrass, her lilting voice music in and of itself.  Though I’ve read the book three or four times, listening to her read it, I heard details I’ve never heard before. 

I was particularly taken this time by her retelling of the indigenous creation story of Skywoman, who fell to the earth “on an autumn breeze,” (3), her fall eased by a flock of geese who gently carried her downward, where a great turtle offered his back upon which to rest. The other animals gathered to bring mud from the bottom of the waters to create a home for Skywoman on land. Many ventured but failed, till only muskrat was left. He dove deep, and after a very long time his limp body surfaced, still clutching a handful of mud in his paw.  He had given his life so that Skywoman might live.  Skywoman was so moved that she sang and danced in thanksgiving, and the land grew. On her way down, she had fleetingly grabbed onto the Tree of Life, and so had brought with her the seeds of all kinds of plants that grew there.  As she danced, she scattered these on the ground where they grew into bountiful gardens. 

What most struck me in hearing this tale again was Kimmerer contrasting Skywoman’s story with the other “woman in the garden creation story,” that of Eve – the one revered as “the cocreator of the good green world that would become the home of her descendants,” the other reviled, “an exile, just passing through. . . to her real home in heaven” (7). How different might our treatment of the earth, and of women, be if we were raised with the cosmology of Skywoman, who created a garden of grasses, fruits, trees, and medicines “for the well-being of all” (5), rather than that of Eve, banished for tasting the fruit of the garden and commanded to subdue the earth. How different if we were to regard life on this earth not as an exile, but rather our true home; if we regarded the flora and fauna, the minerals and waters not as resources, ours for the taking, but rather as gifts born of gratitude and mutual respect; if we lived in awe of the beauty all around us and began each day in gratitude for the earth and its gifts. We might truly live out the entwining of beauty, goodness, justice, and joy.

Kimmerer prefaces her book by describing sweetgrass -- wiingaashk -- as “the sweet-smelling hair of Mother Earth” (ix). Years ago, driving the back roads of northern Michigan with the windows down, when she would catch a whiff, my mother would pull over and have us breathe it in.  “Can you smell it?” she’d ask.  For her, it was the sweetest smell in all the earth. “Breathe it in,” my mother would say. “Breathe it in,” Kimmerer continues, “and you start to remember things you didn’t know you’d forgotten” (ix).

Whether breathing in the sweetness of the earth or ceasing to breathe at all so absorbed in its beauty, we begin to remember what we have forgotten – that all of life is a gift to which we owe reciprocity, that in gratitude and appreciation for these gifts we find healing, and that in all beings lives the capacity for goodness and joy, harmony and mutual regard. The reminder of this true knowing is indeed breathtaking.

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Sources

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. M.D. Herter, trans. Rev. ed. New York: Norton, 1954.

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[i] 7 Best Colors For Healing - Color Meanings (color-meanings.com)

[ii] Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters to a Young Poet. 35. The full quote is, “. . . be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves . . . Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

In Memoriam: Donna Howard

On July 31st of this year, our community and the world lost a champion of peace, justice, and loving kindness, Donna Howard. I first met Donna when she and her then partner, Tom Hastings, came to speak to my class on “Nonviolence: Theory and Practice” in the mid-1990s.  I was a bit in awe of this woman whom I had admired from afar as someone who walked her talk as an advocate for the homeless and oppressed and an activist for peace.  As Barb Kass of the Anathoth Community[i] said of her, “For Donna, nonviolence was a way of life. Her connection with the natural world, her commitment to live simply so others may simply live, her commitment to create safe space for women and children at Olive Branch and Bread and Roses, gave context for her public witness for peace and justice.  Donna was not afraid to speak truth to power in the world arena knowing that it often meant sacrificing personal freedom.” [ii]    I could think of no one better to speak with my students about the practice of nonviolence. I was so impressed with Donna’s deep commitment to the practice of nonviolence, and her activism in establishing the Olive Branch, a house for women and children, part of Loaves and Fishes, a Catholic Worker[iii] community devoted to providing short-term housing and hospitality for the unhoused begun here in 1989. Tom and Donna at that time were planning a Plowshares[iv] action to cut down poles of a transmitter at the US Navy facility, Project ELF, in Clam Lake, Wisconsin, in hopes of disabling the antenna used to transmit extremely low frequency (ELF) messages to the Navy’s fleet of nuclear submarines and launch a first strike. They spoke of their commitment to nonviolent civil disobedience, and of their plan to invite the press to their planned action and to turn themselves in to authorities, because a significant aspect of nonviolent disobedience is to accept responsibility for one’s actions, as well as the consequences.

On Earth Day, 1996, Donna and Tom along with two others cut down the poles, decorated them with photos of children and international law treaties, and turned themselves in to security personnel. Both were charged with felonies – sabotage and interference with government defense, as well as destruction of government property, a misdemeanor, carrying the possibility of fifteen years in prison and a $20,000 fine.

Donna well knew the risks of imprisonment before deciding to engage in the Plowshares action.  Years later, she spoke with my students in “Women, Peace, and War” about how this had been the right time in her life for this action.  As a mother and a daughter, her first priorities were for her children and her parents, and her commitment to taking care of them. But at the time of their action, her children were grown and her parents were alive and well.  Indeed, Donna’s children were her motivation for her actions. As she said to my students, and later to a reporter for the Duluth News Tribune, “Those first moments when they lay the child on your chest and you realize you'd do anything for them. In there somewhere, I realized we have to be willing to do that for all children. That led me to a lifestyle of nonviolence and activism that's not just action or going to a march in Berkeley. It was about who we need to be in relationship to all beings on the earth and what kind of lifestyle that requires of us.”[v]

Donna and Tom used their trial as an opportunity to tell the judge, jury, and the public of how Project ELF, being a system to enable first-strike nuclear weapons, was in violation of international law and US law, and as such their actions were legal.[vi] The two ultimately were found guilty of destruction of government property, but unlike so many involved in Plowshares actions, were acquitted of the felony charges.  Donna was sentenced to three years in prison, of which she spent one year in prison and the other two on house arrest in Duluth. Donna used the time she was in prison to befriend the other women there, listening, caring, offering support.  She was very much a modern-day Emma Goldman in that regard.

A few years later, Donna would go on to help found the Nonviolent Peaceforce[vii], an international organization dedicated to de-escalating conflict and protecting civilians through nonviolent strategies and peace-building.  Hearing about the prospect of creating the Peaceforce, Donna said, “I have spent the last few years destroying things on behalf of peace. Now I want to build something on behalf of peace.”[viii] As Donna explained to my students, governments have been raising and equipping armed forces for millennia using violence to end violence.  Why not raise and train thousands of nonviolent forces to end violence through nonviolence?  That was her aim and her work for many years. She stressed that the Peaceforce only intervened in those places where those involved in the conflict invited them. She shared about her time providing accompaniment for her colleague in Guatemala, knowing full well that her presence as a white woman from the United States offered her colleague safety and protection simply due to her visibility and status.  Her presence would also guarantee coverage by the Western press, which offered an additional layer of protection. She shared as well of her time in Sri Lanka, where the Peaceforce had been invited to de-escalate conflict between the Tamal Tigers and Sri Lankan government forces. She told my students of walking unarmed into the camp of what were considered to be very dangerous and violent extremists, treating them with dignity and kindness, listening to and communicating their concerns, and for a time successfully achieving a ceasefire. Her words and actions inspired my students so deeply.

 After several years in the Peaceforce, Donna returned to Duluth and the Loaves and Fishes community she loved, continuing to work on behalf of the homeless, politically and practically, offering hospitality, kindness, and support. Our lives would intertwine again through her many visits to my classroom, in the local chapter of Grandmothers for Peace, in marches for peace and justice, and as peace marshals at various protests.  As a peace marshal, I always felt secure when Donna was among us, knowing her skill in returning hostile encounters with kindness and love, and de-escalating any potential conflict.

 I recently attended Donna’s celebration of life, a community-wide event, where I learned even more about her life. Remembrances were given by beloved niece; a mother and daughter who came to the Olive Branch when the now young woman was just a baby and remembers Donna as a beloved grandma who continued to check on them all those years later;  a young member of the Loaves and Fishes community for whom Donna was a mentor; a member of the Anathoth Community who had participated with Donna in the Project ELF demonstration; and Nelsie Yang, the daughter of a Hmong family whom Donna and Julie and Tom Morgan chose to sponsor after their church community declined to do so. Nelsie said of Donna that she made her family’s life possible. In January of 2020, Nelsie was sworn in as the youngest and first Hmong American woman elected to serve in the St. Paul city council, living out Donna’s legacy working to dismantle systems of oppression. Everyone remembered Donna for her authenticity, her dedication to peace and justice, her infectious smile and mischievous fun, and for making them feel loved and cared for. She was one of the people I most admired on this earth.  She lived a truly authentic and loving life, living simply and sustainably, always with an open hand and heart to any and all.  

I learned that Donna was a weaver in a way I have only dreamed of being. She sheared the sheep, spun the wool, dyed it, and wove it into wall hangings that still adorn the homes of loved ones.  But more than that, she was a weaver of people and communities – all those to whom she offered shelter and hospitality through Loaves and Fishes, the Hmong community, the Nonviolent Peaceforce and those around the world to whom she brought witness and conflict resolution, the Plowshares movement, Grandmothers for Peace, the Echoes of Peace choir, and the many who remembered her as their “guardian angel,” their “grandma,” and their friend. As Kate Young, a member of Loaves and Fishes, reflected, “I still continue to be shocked by the number of folks I've met that have homes in Donna's heart. It was a ripple effect of radical kindness and Donna was an important guide."[ix]

Toward the end of celebration, on what was a bright, sunny day, a few scattered drops of rain fell, the clouds gently weeping, joining the mourners who had lost a mother, friend, mentor, and an inspiration to all who knew her.  A few hours later, a rainbow appeared, a fitting tribute and farewell of hope, inclusion, and love in honor of a life well-lived.

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Sources:

Catholic Worker Movement

Donna Earlene Howard - Duluth News Tribune | News, weather, and sports from Duluth, Minnesota

Duluth remembers activist - Community honors Donna Howard, founder of Olive Branch house, Duluth News Tribune (MN), September 27, 2022, pA8 (newsbank.com)

 JURY DELIVERS SPLIT VERDICT IN ELF TRIAL CHARGED WITH PROPERTY DAMAGE, Duluth News Tribune (MN), September 14, 1996, p02C (newsbank.com)

Kass, Barb. “Remembrance.” Celebration of Life for Donna Howard, September 25, 2022.

PAIR CUT DOWN ELF POLES, TURN SELVES IN, Duluth News Tribune (MN), April 23, 1996, p01B (newsbank.com)

Project ELF (US Navy) (starlake.org)

Rural Wis. farm serves as activists' idyll - Duluth News Tribune | News, weather, and sports from Duluth, Minnesota

Wisconsin Protest Case May Signal Redefinition of Sabotage - CSMonitor.com

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Notes

[i] The Anathoth Community in Luck, Wisconsin is a Catholic Worker intentional community and farm, dedicated to ending the use of nuclear weapons and to peace.

[ii] Barb Kass, from her Remembrance at Donna’s Celebration of Life, September 25, 2022.

[iii] The Catholic Worker movement was founded in 1933 by Dorothy Day. It is best known for houses of hospitality, providing food, clothing, and shelter to those in need. Since its founding, Catholic Worker communities have sprung up throughout the United States.

[iv] Plowshares is a Catholic Worker movement begun in 1980 by Daniel and Phillip Berrigan and six others to follow the command in Isaiah to “beat swords into plowshares.” They have engaged in mostly symbolic actions against nuclear armaments, pouring blood, beating them with hammers, hanging banners, etc. to call attention to ending nuclear proliferation.

[v] Grandmothers for Peace embraces activism - Women are happy to promote their perspective, Duluth News Tribune (MN), November 14, 2020, pC1 (newsbank.com)

[vi] Tom and Donna’s efforts contributed to the Navy shutting down Project ELF in 2004.

[vii] The Nonviolent Peaceforce continues to this day and currently has 500 people in 35 countries, with the newest project being in Ukraine.

[viii] From Barb Kass, “Remembrance.”

[ix] Duluth remembers activist - Community honors Donna Howard, founder of Olive Branch house, Duluth News Tribune (MN), September 27, 2022, pA8 (newsbank.com)

Authenticity

At long last the leaves on the maple in our front yard are beginning to change color.  It is usually the first tree in our yard to take on its true colors, and it is later than usual this year, undoubtedly due to the rainy spring, summer, and now autumn that we have been experiencing.  This time of year, I find I’m longing for the trees to reveal their true beauty in all their colorful array, and am glad for this beginning.  Soon the woods will be filled with the golden, amber, scarlet, and orange glow of the maples, aspen, birch, and oaks of the northern forest.

It is the time of year I would take my Women and Spirituality students up to a sacred spot on Hawk Ridge to explore their spiritual connections with the earth.  They would share a particular way they felt a connection to the natural world – often a lake – or THE lake, though sometimes a particular place from their childhood, a tree they loved to climb, their dog, or a stone they carried.   We would circle the large pine and invoke Starhawk’s “Open-Eyed Grounding” practice.[i] They would read and comment on one of their favorite passages from the readings – selections from Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature and Carol Christ’s “Rethinking Theology and Nature.”[ii] Then they would disperse across the ridge for their solo encounters with nature, before gathering together again, each returning with something they had discovered during that time.  We would talk about the changing colors of the leaves surrounding us and talk about how these were the true colors of the leaves, finally emerging now that the chlorophyll that had disguised them in green was beginning to wane.  Taking our cue from the leaves, we would talk about authenticity – about their coming into their own true colors.  For that is the work of spiritual growth and transformation -- to emerge as our own true selves, the unique and precious beings in the world that each one is. How often that precious and unique being is taught to mask their true color, blend in -- be “green” like everyone else.  But what a vivid and beautiful world when we come into our own and share our unique gifts and being with the world.

I undoubtedly first became aware of the concept and the meaning of “authenticity” during the years I was immersed in existentialist philosophy, but it would not be until discovering feminist thought several years later that I would grapple with what it meant to live an authentic life.  In her The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir claimed that one of the three reasons women have failed to refuse to be the Other and claim themselves as subjects of their own lives is that in seeking “to forgo liberty and become a thing” they thereby “avoid the strain involved in living an authentic existence” (xxi).

What is the strain of living an authentic life?  It is to carry the full responsibility of one’s choices in life, whether to refuse or to embrace the proscribed role, but only as it is fully and freely chosen, not the mere following of what is expected, or in Audre Lorde’s words, living “by external directives” (58).  And this, said Lorde, “is a grave responsibility . . . not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe” (57). It can be a heavy burden.  As Adrienne Rich wrote, many would be “grateful for some rest . . . glad just to lie down with the sherds we have painfully unearthed. . . . Often I feel this like an exhaustion in my own body” (153).

In some ways, de Beauvoir’s characterization seems unfair.  As a woman with race and class privilege, educated, able to earn a living on her own, living authentically as she did in refusing to marry and have children as was expected of her, may have cost her parental and societal approval, but she was relatively safe from poverty, imprisonment, and violence for her beliefs, actions, and words.  The vast majority of women living under patriarchy, as Adrienne Rich pointed out, have always had to lie to those who have power over them for survival, with perhaps the added cost of having to lie to themselves as well -- in order to secure a husband, a job, their children, or the blessings of the patriarchal church and God. Depending on one’s situation, race, class, and culture, the strain of living an authentic life may vary considerably. One does what one must to survive.

As Gloria Anzaldúa wrote: “The dark-skinned woman has been silenced, gagged, caged, bound into servitude with marriage, bludgeoned for 300 years, sterilized and castrated in the twentieth century. . . . Many times she wished to speak, to act, to protest, to challenge. The odds were heavily against her. She hid her feelings; she hid her truths; she concealed her fire” (Borderlands, 22-23).

But at some point, the strain of living an inauthentic life becomes greater than that of living an authentic life. As Mai Kao Thao said of learning to become the “perfect Hmong woman – wordless, humble, obedient” -- “my silence killed myself” (17). And so a time comes when the need to remove the mask is greater than the need to hide behind it. “We women of color strip off the mascaras others have imposed on us,” wrote Anzaldúa, “see through the disguises we hide behind and drop our personas so that we may become subjects in our own discourses” (Anzaldúa, Making Face xvi).

As Radicalesbians wrote in their manifesto, “The Woman-Identified Woman,” there comes a time when the urge toward liberation requires that “together we must find, reinforce, and validate our authentic selves.  . . . We see ourselves as prime, finding our centers inside of ourselves. . . . We feel a real-ness, feel at last we are coinciding with ourselves” (210). Coinciding with ourselves – the sense of integration, of integrity -- empowers one to go through life whole and grounded, secure in one’s being, clear.

Living an authentic existence is, in Lorde’s words, living “from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves. . .” (58). Lorde defined the erotic as the “the personification of love in all its aspects,” “the lifeforce” “creative energy empowered,” “the yes within ourselves” (55,57).  And she noted, it is never without fear, but is vital to living to one’s fullest capacity.  It is the guide that empowers our choices and opens us to our capacity for joy.  

In his explanation of how the universe works, physicist Brian Swimme also urged us, in different words, to move to that voice from within, to be in touch with the erotic – to fall in love. He likened this to gravity – the mysterious force of allurement that binds the galaxies together and us to the earth.  “By pursuing your allurements, you help bind the universe together,” he wrote. “The unity of the world rests on the pursuit of passion” (48). Each of us pursuing our authentic life as fully as possible, in all its uniqueness and fullness, hold the world together. And by so doing, we encourage the vibrancy in everyone around us.

In her well-known ode to nonconformity, “Warning,” Jenny Joseph declared:

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple

With a red hat, that doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me. . . .

And make up for the sobriety of my youth.

Granted, living an authentic life is a lifelong process, that may glow even brighter with age, but one needn’t wait until elderhood to embrace it. Indeed, far better to enter into it in one’s youth. As the then 25-year-old author of the poem wrote in her last stanza, . . . maybe I should practice a little now.

 Perhaps the trees have reached the age where they too can wear purple, and red, and orange and yellow, living out their best lives in their true vibrancy – inspiring us to do the same, at any age.

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Notes

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987.

______, ed. Making Face, Making Soul: Hacienda Caras/Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987.

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Ed. and trans. H.M. Parshley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953.

Joseph, Jenny. Selected Poems. Hexham, UK: Bloodaxe Books, 1992.

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

Plaskow, Judith and Carol P. Christ. Eds., Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1989.

 Radicalesbians. “The Woman-Identified Woman.” In Kolmar, Wendy and Frances Bartkowski. Feminist Theory: A Reader. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 2000. 195-198.

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

Starhawk. The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004.

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

Thao, Mai Kao. “Sins of Silence.” In Kesselman, Amy, Lily D. McNair, and Nancy Schniedewind, eds. Women: Images and Realities: A Multicultural Anthology. 2nd ed. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1999. 17-18.

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  [i] From Starhawk, The Earth Path: Grounding Your Spirit in the Rhythms of Nature: 52-53.

[ii] From Plaskow, Judith and Carol P. Christ. Eds., Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1989.

Sisterhood

Everything I need to know about sisterhood I learned from my sister.

I was born into sisterhood.  My sister, Jeannie, who is ten years older than I am, loves to tell the story of how, in the days before prenatal testing, she told her 4th grade teacher that she was going to have a sister.  She already had two brothers, so she was convinced that the baby our mother was carrying – me – would be a girl.  She welcomed and delighted in my presence on this earth even before I was born. 

My mother was too ill to care for me in the weeks and months immediately after my birth, so I was cared for by a nurse who thought it best not to comfort me when I cried. But when she could, my tender-hearted sister would sneak into the room where I lay in my bassinette, hold me, and soothe my tears. Even as an adult, in the moments of my deepest grief and pain, the body memories of my sister picking me up and consoling me would flood me with relief.

When I was young, Jeannie was my brother’s and my best babysitter and playmate. The fun maker – she would make Fox and Geese tracks and chase us in the snow, take us ice skating in the winter and swimming in the summer, and play endless rounds of “Spit” and “Yahtzee.”  I loved the special times on vacation when we kids had a cabin all to ourselves, and she’d make us hot cocoa and play Black Jack with us using round pieces of black licorice for chips.

Jeannie left for college when I was only eight, but came home when her husband went to Vietnam when I was in high school.  It was then that she became my best friend. She was always the one with whom I’d share my troubles and secret joys, the first one I’d call when something awful or wonderful happened, the one I could always count on to be there.  In the years I was waiting for my transplant, she and her family would travel from Ohio to Minnesota every year for Christmas, and she spent weeks of her summers helping me take care of my young son when my life was too precarious to be left on my own. In the weeks after my transplant, she gave up precious PTO from her job as a teacher to be my caregiver and support person in the Twin Cities, while my husband stayed home with our young son.

Though we live a thousand miles apart, letters, emails, phone calls, and texts have kept us connected. We’ve never gone a year without seeing each other, and our times together now are precious. Jeannie has shown me the best of sisterhood – affirming and supporting me in all of my endeavors, giving me a trusted confidante with whom I could share the truths of my life, showing up when I have needed extra care and support, celebrating the moments of joy and triumph, understanding me in a way that few have. So, when I came into feminism in my twenties, I was deeply drawn to the feminist ideal of sisterhood.

I first found nascent notions of the feminist concept of sisterhood when studying early nineteenth century feminists. For Sarah Grimké[i], who closed each of her “Letters on the Equality of the Sexes” with, “Thine in the bonds of sisterhood,” those bonds were primarily of shared oppression. She regarded men’s oppression of women to be universal, knowing no boundaries of race, class, or culture, and wrote at length of the oppressed condition of women in the U.S., Asia, Africa, and Europe. In her abolitionist work she condemned the sexual, physical, and emotional abuse of enslaved females and called on white women to act in solidarity with their enslaved sisters, and refuse their complicity in such abuse.

Grimké’s contemporary, Margaret Fuller[ii], emphasized the positive bonding of women. Rejecting the notion that women should mistrust and compete with one another, she asserted instead that women may indeed love one another. She urged women to respect themselves, to trust in their own intellects and impulses, to believe in the capacity of their own souls.  She sought to develop communities of support among women in their common search for the essence of womanhood, as well as in the daily activities of life, suggesting communal kitchen, laundries, and childcare to free up women’s time for other pursuits.  “I believe that, at present, women are the best helpers of one another” (Woman, 205).

“Sisterhood is powerful” became the rallying cry of Second Wave feminism -- a sisterhood of “the shared primary oppression of being female in a patriarchal world” (Morgan, Sisterhood, xxxv ), as well as mutual love and support often discovered in consciousness-raising groups. However, this notion of sisterhood came under two critiques: first, that women often oppress other women, and second, that white middle-class feminists narrowly conceived the notion of ‘sisterhood’ around their own issues in ways exclusive of other women. In her essay, “Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Among Women,” bell hooks highlighted racism, classism, and sexism toward other women (in the forms of trashing, disregard, and professional and competitive violence) as ways women continue to oppress other women. In addition, women in wealthy, developed countries are complicit in the oppression of women of the global South  through imperialism, violence and war, and patterns of consumption and energy use.

Hooks also questioned the idea of a “fundamentally common female experience” (Talking Back, 23), as did Audre Lorde, who saw “sisterhood” used as a pretense of a homogeneity of experience that was actually only white women’s.  Critics have argued that the notions of sisterhood, as mythologized by white feminists, was based in an organic and affectional bonding that masks pressures of conformity and erasure of difference. Lynet Uttal described feminist sisterhood as “protecting ourselves from any differences, maintaining at all costs an image of solidarity” (318).  However, building on the wisdom of Lorde who wrote, “it is not our differences which separate women but our reluctance to recognize those differences” (Sister,  122), feminists envisioned a different idea of sisterhood that values a solidarity built on the strengths of difference and plurality.  Womanist theologian Karen Baker-Fletcher has referred to this revised notion of “sisterhood” as sisterist -- womanist yet in solidarity with diverse types of women.  As hooks wrote, “We can be sisters united by shared interests and beliefs, united in our appreciation for diversity, united in our struggle to end sexist oppression, united in political solidarity” (Feminist,  165).

It was both in my experience working with feminist organizations in this community and later, in my study of these organizations[iii], that I lived that sistering and sisterhood. Creating and working within Women’s Studies both locally and nationally has been a continual and often challenging process of listening, learning, growing, and befriending together as we have worked through and woven together the threads of difference and change.  I had some of the deepest experiences of sistering across difference of sexual orientation through the Northcountry Women’s Coffeehouse – bonding through music, celebration, laughter, and shared sorrows and fears. One particular moment was the night when Rosie Rocco talked about the death threats many in the lesbian community were receiving when the City Council was considering passage of the Human Rights Ordinance.  As she began to sing Holly Near’s “Singing For Our Lives,” we all rose, linked arms, and began singing together. And never have I known such community as the night of my cardiac arrest there, when they kept my heart pumping and their breath filled my lungs, and then followed me to the hospital and stayed outside the CCU the rest of the night and supported my family and me through the trials ahead. I would later come to know such sistering working with water protectors to stop the Sandpiper and Line 3 and being welcomed so warmly into the indigenous women’s community and the circle formed by my Indigenous Focusing-Oriented Trauma therapy cohort.

One of the things that struck me while researching the history of grassroots feminism in the Twin Ports was the number of actual sisters involved in creating feminist organizations here – Shirley Oberg and Jill Abernathy, Tina Olson and Madeleine Tjaden, Michelle LeBeau and Lindy Askelin – but even more, the chosen “sisters” – Tina Welsh and Rosie Rocco, Ellen Pence and Shirley Oberg, Tina Olson and Liz LaPrairie and Jenny James, Bilin Tsai and Mary Zimmerman, and so many more. It was especially when interviewing Marvella Davis and Babette Sandman about their time in DAIP’s Women’s Action Group that I heard of the kind of mutual respect, empowerment, and sisterhood that resonated with my own experience with my sister.  Marvella recalled how her ex-husband showed up at the group, pounding on the window demanding she come out, but the women surrounded her and kept her safe till he went away. “That was the beautiful thing back then,” said Babette, “we were actually sisters.” In the group they learned about horizontal hostility among women -- women fighting with each other, often over men -- and learned instead that other women were their sisters.  Each of them had “a piece of the truth no matter what.” ”It felt like a jewel inside of us that we didn’t even know we had.  . . We were so upheld.”  Babette, who had joined the group after coming out of an abusive relationship said, “I didn’t even know I was a human being I was so dehumanized . . . . And to have someone treat me like that . . . and to discover that women are my sisters.  . . . It was not just words. We felt that. We were believed. We were valued. We had wisdom. We had a piece of the truth. We were carrying around a gem. People were interested in us. And we had sisters.”

This is the best of feminist sisterhood.  As Baker-Fletcher noted, sisterhood is not always perfect, but “sistering and sisterist allow for open-ended but committed relationships, in which there is plenty of room for learning, growth, and the love that develops from ongoing talk, listening, work, and play with one another” (Sisters, 9).  I have been fortunate to experience this sistering of uplifting the dignity, truths, and value of each other, of learning and growing together in building a Women’s Studies program, in Women’s Studies classrooms, in consciousness-raising groups, in the local feminist community, and especially in friendships. It all began with my sister, my friend.

Happy 80th birthday, my beloved sister.  Thank you beyond measure for seventy years of sisterhood.

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Notes

Baker-Fletcher, Karen. Sisters of Dust, Sisters of Spirit: Womanist Wordings on God and Creation.  Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998.

Bartlett, Elizabeth Ann. Liberty, Equality, Sorority: The Origins and Interpretation of American Feminist Thought: Frances Wright, Sarah Grimké, and Margaret Fuller.  New York: Carlson Publishing, 1994.

______. Making Waves: Grassroots Feminism in Duluth and Superior. Minneapolis: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2016.

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

Davis, Marvella and Babette Sandman. Personal Interview. December 11, 2014.

Grimké, Sarah. Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and Others Essays.  Ed. and with an Introduction by Elizabeth Ann Bartlett. New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1988.

Hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press, 1989.

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

Ossoli, Margaret Fuller. Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition and Duties of Woman. Ed. Arthur B. Fuller, Boston: John P. Jewett, 1855.

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

[i] Sarah Grimké (1792-1873) was an abolitionist speaker and feminist who wrote a series of letters on the condition of women to Mary Parker, president of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society in the New England Spectator in 1838, initially begun in response to a Pastoral Letter from the Council of Congregationalist Ministers of Massachusetts who denounced her and her sister’s behavior of speaking in public as unwomanly and unchristian. William Lloyd Garrison printed the letters in his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, and Grimké eventually published them in a single tract, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes.

[ii] Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was a journalist and editor of the Transcendentalist publication, The Dial.  Her Woman in the Nineteenth Century (p. 1845) was considered one of the major feminist works of her time. She died tragically in a shipwreck off of Fire Island, New York, at the age of 40.

[iii] See my Making Waves: Grassroots Feminism in Duluth and Superior.

“I wanted to know . . . why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe.” – Robin Wall Kimmerer

Along the roadside, broad swaths of Queen Anne’s lace and chicory grace the landscape as far as I can see.  I revel in their exquisite beauty. The delicate white petals of the Queen Anne’s lace paired with the extraordinary blue of the chicory evoke not only awe in me, but tenderness, gratitude, and memories of my mother pointing out these favorite flowers every year as they came into their full bloom during the heart of summer in northern Michigan. How she loved the blue and white, made even more beautiful by their contrast with each other.

Queen Anne’s Lace

The Queen Anne’s lace ranges from small flowers to big, lacy, showy ones.  Some would be curled up like a bird’s nest.  My mom always had us look for the extra special ones that had a ruby in the center.  These were the jewels of the meadow. That ruby center may be the reason for the flower’s name, for it is said that Queen Anne II pricked her finger while tatting lace, causing a drop of blood to fall onto the lace.

Chicory

For a summer, my mom wrote a nature column for the local rural newspaper.  Of the chicory she wrote, “They’re heavenly, and as blue as a Walloon sky. . . . During the war, roasted ground Chicory was occasionally added to our coffee to stretch the coffee supply. Sometimes it is substituted for coffee. But there is no substitute for the blue of the Chicory” (Northland Press, July 23, 1970).

This is what my mother taught me about wildflowers – appreciation.  She passed along the names of the many wildflowers near our cabin in Michigan, making sure we could identify tawny hawkweed, sweet pea, knapweed, Johnny-go-to-bed-at noon, brown-eyed Susan, blue cohosh, white baneberry, Bouncing Bet, thistle, daisy, aster, and of course, Queen Anne’s lace and chicory – not so we could know their genus and species and scientific specifications, but so that we could know them as our friends.

In the first of her nature columns my mom wrote, “I am not a botanist, or expert, . . . just a neighbor who wishes to share some of her friends with you” (Northland Press, July 2, 1970).  And that is how I came to know wildflowers, as friends who came to live among us at different times of year -- beginning with the small woodland violets of early spring to the mid-sized mid-summer daisies and sweet peas, to the tall goldenrod and purple asters of late summer and early fall.  I would look forward to their appearance as one would a long-time friend who has been gone for a time but has now returned.  I still do. 

Since moving to Minnesota, I’ve made an effort to become acquainted with the local flora -- some familiar like violets, jack-in-the-pulpit, trillium, jewelweed, and goldenrod, but others completely new to me like nodding trillium, bloodroot, wood anemone, marsh marigold, bunchberry, Turk’s cap lily, and our state flower – the lady’s slipper — though the Anishinaabemowin word for it, makizinwaabigwaan, or “moccasin flower,” seems more appropriate, since it looks far more like a moccasin than a lady’s slipper. 

I’ve been lucky enough to see yellow lady’s slippers both here and in Michigan, but the pink lady’s slipper (makazinkwe — the Aanishinaabemowin word indicating it is a woman’s mocassin*) has eluded me.  Then this spring my friend Kathy told me about a patch she and her husband had found on a part of the Superior Hiking Trail that runs through Duluth.  My husband and I hiked the trail a few days later, joined at various points along the way by other lady’s slipper seekers.  “Are you here to see the lady’s slippers?” they would inquire. “We are, too.” It was well worth the hike.  The pink lady’s slippers were stunning – quite different from the yellow lady’s slippers – much taller, with larger blossoms.  Forest orchids – they took my breath away – or in Kimmerer’s words, “rocked me back on my heels in awe.”

In her Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer tells of how she wanted to study botany to understand why the world is so beautiful – specifically, why asters and goldenrod look so beautiful together. Though her college adviser told her that such ponderings were in the realm of aesthetics, not science, she would go on to discover a scientific reason for this pairing. The fact that the yellow of the goldenrod and the purple of the aster are complementary colors makes them even more vivid and thus more attractive to pollinators.

She had found her scientific answer, but in doing so, had forgotten the indigenous way of seeing the world that had initially drawn her to the study of plants.  It took a conversation with a Navajo woman to remind her of what she had already known – the stories, the songs, the relationships, and the simple beauty of the plants. “In indigenous knowing, we understand a thing only when we understand it with all four aspects of our being: mind, body, emotion, and spirit” (47).

As Alice Walker would say, Kimmerer had to get that white man “off her eyeball” before she could see what was right in front of her. In The Color Purple, the character Shug said she’d been so busy thinking about that white man’s God that “I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn . . . not the color purple. . . . Not the little wildflowers” (179).  But now she knew that all these things are just God’s way of trying to please us. “It always making little surprises and springing them on us when we least expect. . . . Everything want to be loved.” (178).

And that is why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock our world.  We are bowled over in love with the world. . . and She smiles.

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* My thanks to Valerie Ross Zhawendaagozikwe for her help with the Anishinaabemowin translations.

Notes

Bartlett, Elizabeth H.. “Friends to See at Walloon.”  Boyne City, MI: Northland Press, July 2, 1970 & July 23, 1970.

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

Queen Anne's Lace: Facts & Folklore - Farmers' Almanac (farmersalmanac.com)

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

" . . . the least harm possible, and maybe, even a little good."

“All I can do is to do the least harm possible, and maybe, even a little good.”  These were words spoken by my son in a conversation we had recently about the state of the world, he a young man trying to figure out the best way to live decently in the world in these difficult times.  I was surprised, touched, and delighted to hear my son speaking the same words Albert Camus had penned in his novel The Plague, even though he had never read it – words that inspired me when I first read them decades ago, words that inspired me listening to my son a couple weeks ago.  In The Plague, Camus depicts a plague-stricken town, with hundreds of innocent people dying and others giving their lives to battle the plague.  Speaking through the character Tarrou, like my son, Camus said: “We can’t stir a finger in this world without the risk of bringing death to somebody.  . . . I have realized that we all have plague, and I have lost my peace.  . . . I only know that one must do what one can to cease being plague-stricken, . . . This, and only this, can bring relief to men and, if not save them, at least do them the least harm possible and even, sometimes, a little good” (228).

I was incredibly moved by my son’s wisdom, and that he had come to this code of ethical behavior on his own, without ever having read Camus.  His words also were sobering in the recognition that we are in a similar state of siege in this country and the world that Camus had lived through while exiled in France during the Nazi occupation. The rhetoric of hate; the plague of gun violence; a Supreme Court determined to strip away the rights and liberties that were only so recently affirmed; the climate crisis; the resurgence of authoritarianism and war; the rising cost of the basics of food, shelter, and health care; the ongoing oppression of women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ peoples; and quite literally an ongoing plague – these are troubling times indeed.

In 1984, I was teaching a course on utopias and dystopias in which the students read 1984. At the time, I felt relieved and reassured that here we were in 1984, and none of what George Orwell predicted had come to pass – Big Brother watching our every move, the rewriting of history, doublespeak, doublethink, Newspeak, the Thought Police, the Hate. We had learned the lessons of World War II, and would never let such fascist hatred rise again. We were better and wiser now.  I lived in a naïve confidence that our future was bright.

Yet recently I have often heard the term “Orwellian” to describe the state of the country.  George Orwell – a champion of the downtrodden, of the “down and out,” who spent his life resisting tyranny.  It seems a disservice to call these times “Orwellian,” yet I understand the reference to the world he depicted in his dystopia1984. Ironically, as Rebecca Solnit noted in her Orwell’s Roses, 1984 was the last good year (71).  By this she meant for the climate -- the last year in which the levels of atmospheric carbon were below the 350 parts per million climate scientist James Hansen set as the upper limit for a stable earth. By 2021, they were 416 ppm, foreboding a different kind of dystopic future.

In the novel, The Plague, Tarrou reflects, “What’s natural is the microbe.  All the rest – health, integrity, purity (if you like) – is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter.  The good man, the man who infects hardly anyone, is the man who has the fewest lapses of attention.  And it needs tremendous will power, a never-ending tension of the mind, to avoid such lapses.  Yes, Rieux, it’s a wearying business, being plague-stricken. But it’s still more wearying to refuse to be it “ (229).

It has been wearying.  The struggles for justice and the earth have been many, and have often seemed relentless. Yet, coming of age politically as I did in the peace, feminist, and environmental movements, it seemed to me that we were moving in an ever more progressive arc of freedom, equality, and justice.  The Civil Rights Act; the Voting Rights Act; the Clean Air Act and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency;  Medicare and Medicaid; Roe v. Wade and the Equal Pay Act; gay marriage; Women’s Studies, American Indian Studies, African American Studies, LatinX Studies, and Environmental Studies in the academy, the election of the first Black president – despite ongoing wars, racism, patriarchy, and environmental disasters, it was easy to think we were moving in a direction that was unstoppable, and to let the vigilance falter. As Adrienne Rich wrote, “. . . many of us would be grateful for some rest in that struggle.” Perhaps that is why at least some of us let our attention lapse, while the forces arrayed against the full dignity and health of all beings on this planet gained significant ground.  But Rich continued, “The politics worth having, the relationships worth having, demand that we delve still deeper” (193). And so, the often-wearying vigilance against the plague must continue.

Yet Camus also reminded us, “Really, it’s too damn silly living only in and for the plague. Of course, one should fight for the victims, but if one ceases caring for anything outside that, what’s the use of fighting” (229).  So in the novel, the resistance workers Tarrou and Rieux decide to go for a swim, “a harmless pleasure,” for friendship’s sake. For that’s ultimately what the struggle is for – for love, for friendship, for beauty, for the good life. And in the midst of, or perhaps as part of his resistance to tyranny, Orwell continued to plant roses.

Many of the writers who have most inspired me came from that World War II generation – Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Albert Memmi, Anne Frank.  All of them managed to retain a commitment to the dignity of all and respect for others and the common good, and also to find beauty amidst the rubble, roses in the ruins. Sometimes the worst of the world brings out the best in people. 

I have often bemoaned the world we are bequeathing to the younger generations. Yet, my son’s words give me hope that from this sea of possible despair he and so many others, on a daily basis, continue to try to do the least harm possible, and maybe, even a little good.  He reminded me of the basic goodness of people – those who continue to resist injustice, who regularly act with kindness and commitment to life on this planet, who offer gifts of friendship and generosity.  I suspect his generation will become the next Camus’s and Arendts and Orwells.  They already are.

Solnit concludes her study of George Orwell’s life and work by saying that in the things Orwell valued, his commitment to liberty and human rights and to pleasure and joy, he recognized “ . . . that these can be forces of opposition to the authoritarian state and its soul-destroying intrusions.” She ends by saying, “The work he did is everyone’s job now. It always was” (268). I am inspired by so many of the young people I know who know this, and will continue to do the work.  May they also enjoy the simple pleasure of going for a swim, the gift of friendship, and the beauty of a hillside of flowers, and may they be assured that they are, more often than they know, doing a little good.

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Notes

Camus, Albert. The Plague. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Modern Library, 1948.

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

Solnit, Rebecca. Orwell’s Roses. New York: Viking, 2021.

"We hold these truths . . . " : A Women's Declaration of Independence

“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.  Whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, . . . when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolution despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.  Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled.” -   Declaration of Sentiments, 1848

In 1840, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. As women, they soon discovered they were not entitled to speak, or even to be on the floor of the hall.  Confined to the balcony and silenced, they decided then and there to hold a convention on the rights of women. Eight years later, on July 19th and 20th, 1848, the first Woman’s Rights Convention was held near Stanton’s home in Seneca Falls, New York. The one hundred women and men gathered there debated, voted on, and signed the Declaration of Sentiments, a manifesto on the rights of women. Taking the 1776 Declaration of Independence as a model, they rewrote paragraphs to state their case as women, substituted “all men” for “King George,” and added the key phrase, “all men and women are created equal.”

Since the time, most of the eighteen grievances and twelve resolutions have been addressed, at least legally. Women in the US now have the right to vote, to an education, to all professions and employments.  Married women have the right to their earnings and to own property, to divorce, and to sign contracts.  Husbands are no longer permitted to deprive their wives of liberty or to beat them, though the legacy of those previously sanctioned acts continues.  In many religious sects, with some considerable exceptions, women are permitted to act as ministers and rabbis and in other positions of authority.

Nevertheless, the most recent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade has made some of these 1848 grievances and resolutions pertinent once again:

“He [meaning men - or in this case the Justices] has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and to her God.

He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.

 . . . because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States. . . .

Resolved, That such laws as conflict, in any way, with the true and substantial happiness of woman, are contrary to the great precept of nature and of no validity. . . .

Resolved, That all laws which prevent woman from occupying such a station in society as her conscience shall dictate, or which place her in a position inferior to that of man, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and therefore of no force or authority.

Resolved, That woman is man’s equal -- was intended to be so by the Creator, and the highest good of the race demands that she should be recognized as such. . . .

Resolved,  That the equality of human rights results necessarily from the fact of the identity of the race in capabilities and responsibilities” (Rossi, 416-419).

Many had prepared the way for the crafting of the Declaration.  Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman written in 1792 had inspired many who were there.  So had the speeches of 1820s feminist and labor organizer Frances Wright; the editorials and book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, of transcendentalist author and editor Margaret Fuller; and the series of newspaper articles that became Letters on the Equality of the Sexes by feminist and abolitionist Sarah M. Grimké. However, the main inspirations were three: the continual denial of rights of religious freedom, freedom of expression, education, employment, and participation in government to women; the work of so many of the participants in the abolitionist movement, where they also were fighting for the recognition of the liberty and equality of enslaved women and men; and the example of the Haudenosaunee women with whom many of the women and men at the convention were friends.[i] The last was particularly important, as the women living in upstate New York, where the convention was held, through their frequent interaction with the Haudenosaunee people, whose land they occupied, became well acquainted with a different reality for women. Haudenosaunee women were treated with deep respect; they had an equal voice in their government; violence of any kind against Haudenosaunee women was strictly forbidden and they could walk alone at night in complete safety; they wore comfortable clothing (later adopted by Amelia Bloomer and others as a few settler women wore pantaloons); and they knew ways to ease the pain of childbirth. True equality, respect, and freedom of women was in evidence around the settler women — a freedom and equality they had never known but now knew was indeed possible. Tragically, this equality, freedom, and respect of the Haudenosaunee would be horrifically quashed through the conquest of European settlers -- the same settlers who would write and sign the Declaration that we celebrate to this day on the 4th of July.  Would that it had been written to include all peoples.

When I was growing up, my mother would commemorate the 4th of July by reading the Declaration of Independence. She was proud of this heritage of liberty and equality for all, and also was a nascent feminist — telling me often that she refused to include the word “obey” in her marriage vows, and the only one among her group of friends to support the Equal Rights Amendment. In her later years, she developed a presentation based on Judith Nies’ Seven Women, in which she and six others enacted the lives and words of these women,[ii] with herself taking on the role of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  I suspect that on this 4th of July, she would gladly reprise her role and read this alternative -- the Declaration of Sentiments -- in all its passion and fury, instead.

Notes

Nies, Judith. Seven Women: Portraits from the American Radical Tradition. New York: Vintage, 1977.

Stanton, Elizabeth C., Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda J. Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage. Rochester: NY, Charles Mann, 1881). In Rossi, Alice S., ed. The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir.  New York & London: Columbia University Press, 1973. 413-470.

Wagner, Sally Roesch. “The Indigenous Roots of United States Feminism.” In Ricciutelli, Luciana, Angela Miles and Margaret H. McFadden, eds. Feminist Politics, Activism, and Vision: Local and Global Challenges. Toronto: Inanna Publications, 2004. 267-283.

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[i] I am indebted to Sally Roesch Wagner for her work researching and writing about the influence of the Haudenosaunee on the women who organized the Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls.

[ii] The seven women profiled in Nies’ book are Sarah M. Grimké, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mother Jones, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anna Louise Strong, and Dorothy Day.

Where to begin? . . .

Where to begin? How to make sense of the completely contradictory Supreme Court rulings last week of New York State Rifle and Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, taking away the right of the state of New York to regulate the sale of guns, and Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, granting the state of Mississippi the right to regulate women’s choices about their bodies and health? When do “states’ rights” stand, and when do they fall?  Whose freedom is protected, and whose not? How did we come to this moment when the freedom to carry a gun, or not, is considered more inviolable than a woman’s freedom to carry a pregnancy, or not? Much has been written recently about the political maneuvering of the past few decades that led to this moment,[i]  but my mind has been swirling around a much longer arc, of the millennia of conquest, politics, and law that led to this moment.

Where to begin?  In a course on Western legal systems I TA’d for, the professor began with Roman law. We see the linguistic signature and influence of Roman law in so many of our legal principles today – stare decisis – let the decision stand – the rule of precedent (oops, the current Supreme Court forgot that one); amicus curiae, quid pro quo, affidavit, ex post facto, habeas corpus, subpoena, status quo, guardian ad litem, pro bono – the list could go on and on.  Roman law – the law of the conquerors, of a civilization shaped by the glory of conquest, and the system of law that bequeathed to us patria potestas – the rule of the father.  Under patria potestas, the father, or the oldest male in the family no matter the age, held the power of punishment, life and death, over all the other members of the household – wives, children, slaves.

Or do we begin with English common law, the basis of so much of US law, shaped not by the people or their representatives, but by court rulings of mostly unelected judges.  English common law -- the law that gave us the doctrine of coverture, defined here by 18th century jurist William Blackstone: “By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing. . . . “ Under this doctrine, a married woman could not own property, sign contracts, practice law, sue for divorce, have custody of her children, or be considered a responsible moral or legal agent in her own right.

Or perhaps we should begin with canon law -- the law of papal decrees that have influenced much US law on marriage, divorce, contraception and abortion, and legal personage.[ii]  Canon law – shaped by theological debates on whether or not women should exist, ultimately deciding we are a necessary evil for purposes of reproduction.[iii] Canon law – the law that gave us the “witchburnings” – the demonization of women as agents of the devil and the burning alive of midwives for the crime of easing the pain and suffering of women in childbirth. Canon law – that to this day denies to women bodily autonomy surrounding reproduction, for their role in life is to carry the sacred male seed to its intended purpose.[iv] Canon law – the law that also brought us the Doctrine of Discovery – the Papal Bull that any land not occupied by Christians was available to be “discovered” and claimed by Christian conquest. It became embedded in US law in Johnson v. McIntosh, where Justice John Marshall wrote, "that the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to New World lands.” Papal law -- bestowing nearly a divine blessing on guns as weapons of conquest.

Or should we begin with the writers of the Constitution -- wealthy, white, property-owning, many slave-owning men, determined to structure a government that would ensure the protection of their property and status, a government not to be entrusted to the rabble of common men. Thus, the election of Senators was to be determined not by the people, but by state legislators. Nor was the election of the President to be entrusted to the people, but rather to elite electors, the electoral college – an antiquated, anti-democratic institution that has repeatedly thwarted the will of the majority of citizens of this country. The Constitution was shaped in a time when even the most liberal of the writers, John Adams, responded to his wife, Abigail Adams’s plea to “remember the ladies” in the new document he was forging, for, as she said, “all men would be tyrants if they could”: ”As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh. . . . We know better than to repeal our masculine systems.  . .”  He went on to say that to give these up,  “ . . .would compeatly [sic] subject Us to the Despotism of the Petticoat” (Rossi, 10-11).  He said further in a letter to James Sullivan[v], that to give in to this demand would lead them down a dangerous slippery slope to include even younger men and men without property. “There will be no end of it. New claims will arise  . . . It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks to one common level” (Rossi, 15).  Ah, the horror of equality.

Or should we begin with Marbury v. Madison, the 1803 Supreme Court decision that firmly established the principle of judicial review – the power of the federal courts to decide whether or not laws enacted by Congress and state legislatures are constitutional, making the Supreme Court the more powerful, not the co-equal of the other two branches of government as originally intended. Ultimately, this laid the power to decide the fate of a nation in the hands of nine unelected individuals with tenure for life, and enshrined the Constitution with a sacred, almost god-given quality, as if it were not a document created by elite white men determined not to let a distrusted majority rule.

Granted, since the founding of the United States, several efforts to make amends for the founders’ wrongs have passed – the 13th amendment ending slavery (except in cases of imprisonment  -- slavery by another name); the 14th, granting equal protection and due process of law to all citizens (though Indians are not to be counted and for the first time citizens are designated as “males”); the 15th, declaring the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude (though not on account of sex); the 17th, which allows for the election of US Senators directly by the people (meaning men) of each state; the 19th which finally grants suffrage to women; the 23rd, granting citizens living in Washington, D.C. the right to vote in presidential elections; the 24th, forbidding the imposition of a poll tax requirement on the ability to vote; and the 26th, granting the right to vote to 18-year-olds.  Landmark rulings, like Brown v. Board of Education, Yick Wo v. Hopkins, Loving v. Virginia, Griswold v. Connecticut, Roe v. Wade, and Obergefell v. Hodges[vi], have expanded rights and liberties.  Yet to this day, the US Constitution fails to guarantee equality on the basis of sex.

Through all the twists and turns of the sex equality cases – Reed v. Reed, Frontiero v. Richardson, etc., the Supreme Court has come closer to granting the same standard of “strict scrutiny” to cases of sex discrimination that it grants to cases involving race, religion, and national origin, but not quite.[vii]  Given the reluctance of the Court, that would require the enactment of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution which guarantees that “equality of the law will not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.” Failed in its initial attempt, the ERA is now ratified in the required number of states, but Congress has failed to act on installing it in the Constitution.  The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued that a better ground for Roe would have been on the principle of equal protection on the basis of sex, rather than the weaker foundation of privacy, a right implied but not explicitly stated in the Constitution, and as we have seen, far too easily undone.  But we have no guarantee of equal protection on the basis of sex. Even if we did, in 1974, the Court ruled in Geduldig v. Aiello that pregnancy is not a sex-related condition. Moreover, in a sharp break from precedent, the recent Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade requires only the “rational relation” test of any state laws regarding abortion, rendering it the weakest possible test as to whether or not the state has a legitimate reason for denying a woman’s right to life and liberty. 

One might go on to ask, who determines whether or not a law is “rational.”  I remember the looks of astonishment, confusion, anger, and disgust on the faces of the brilliant and passionate women in a course I taught in the community on women and the law when they asked this question, realizing the vast discrepancy between what they considered to be reasonable, and what the majority on the Court did.

Perhaps it makes the most sense to begin with the Western origins of patriarchy itself, and the ways it became enshrined in religion and codified into law – the Hebraic, Assyrian, Mesopotamian, Babylonian laws that established women as the property of men; that divided women by their given status as wives, concubines, and slaves; that established laws of adultery – a crime only the wife could commit; of rape – a property crime against another man, punishable by forcing the raped woman to marry the rapist; and abortion –  if caused by the blow of a man to another man’s daughter – a monetary fine, for this is a property crime after all, or if caused by a married man, then his own wife will be similarly treated, but if induced by the woman herself, such an act was equivalent to high treason, for which “’she shall be impaled and shall not be buried’” (Middle Assyrian Law (MAL) §53 quoted in Lerner, 120.)

Where to begin indeed.  How to make sense of a system of laws assuming it to be reasonable, or unbiased, or above politics, and not shaped by millennia of those who would bend the law to their purposes? If, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, the arc of the universe is long, but does bend toward justice, it also has its twists and turns. Historian Gerda Lerner once counseled my students to patience, reminding them of how very long that arc is, of how far we have come from those days of the ancient Assyrian laws -- a useful perspective, perhaps, and yet we still hear their echoes. Much has been made of the fact that this is the first time the Court has interpreted the Constitution in such a way as to repeal rights and freedoms it had previously acknowledged.  It is right to look upon that with concern for what may be next, for at the moment, it seems the arc is bending back the way it came.

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Endnotes

[i] Mary Ziegler’s piece is one of the best I’ve seen. Opinion | Roe’s Death Will Change American Democracy - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

[ii] To see the influence of canon law and the Catholic church on the recent decision overturning Roe, I recommend reading the response in the National Catholic Register which blatantly states that the imposition of the views of the Catholic church onto US law was the result of a half-century-long campaign to recruit and install “able and willing” lawyers onto the Supreme Court. Dobbs Decision: A Monumental Moment in the March for Equal Rights for Every Human Life| National Catholic Register (ncregister.com)

[iii] Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica.  Qu. 92, The Creation of Woman.

[iv] See my earlier post on Rosemary Radford Ruether, where she wrote, “Woman is taught that the worst of sins, the worst of crimes, is to deflect the male seed from its intended course in her womb. This is more sinful than rape, for the rape of a woman does not interfere with the purposes of the seed, while contraception wastes the precious seed and defeats its high purposes. . . . She must obediently accept the effects of these holy male acts upon her body, must not seek to control their effects, must not become a conscious decision maker about the destiny of her own body” (Sexism and God-Talk, 261).

[v] James Sullivan was a lawyer and politician who served on Massachusett’s ratifying convention for the US Constitution and later became the governor of the state.

[vi] Brown v. Board of Education (1954) outlawed segregation on the basis of race in public schools. Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886) ruled that a law that is race-neutral on its face, but prejudicial in its administration, is unconstitutional. Loving v. Virginia (1967) struck down all state laws banning interracial marriage. Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) permitted the use of contraceptives by married couples only without government interference. It would not be until 1972 in Eisenstadt v. Baird that this right would be extended to unmarried individuals. Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) guaranteed the right to marry to same-sex couples. The now overturned Roe v. Wade, protected women’s rights to abortion without state regulation or interference, at least up until the second and third trimesters.

[vii] The term “strict scrutiny” refers to the highest standard of evaluation a court applies in determining the constitutionality of state and federal law.  Under “strict scrutiny” the government interest in violating equal protection or due process of law must be “compelling,” and the relationship to the state’s interest must be “narrowly tailored.” The next highest is that the government interest be “exceedingly persuasive” and “substantially related.” The intermediate standard is that the government interest be “important” and “substantially related.” Finally, the rational relationship test, the lowest standard, is that the state’s interest be “legitimate” and “rational.”

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Notes

Aquinas, Thomas. St.Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics: A New Translation, Backgrounds, Interpretations.  Paul E. Sigmund, Trans. and Ed.  New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988.

Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England. (1765-1769). Lonang Institute, 1769.

Dobbs Decision: A Monumental Moment in the March for Equal Rights for Every Human Life| National Catholic Register (ncregister.com)

Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, “Some Thoughts on Autonomy and Equality in Relation to Roe v. Wade, 63, NCL. Rev 375, 382, 386 (1985).

Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy (Women and History, V. 1). New York & London: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Opinion | Roe’s Death Will Change American Democracy - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Rossi, Alice S. ed., The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir. New York & London: Columbia University Press, 1973.

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. 10th Anniversary ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983, 1993). 

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Praisesong for the Sun: Reflections on this Summer Solstice

Today is the summer solstice – an especially long longest day up here in the north. With sunrise at 5:14 and sunset at 9:06, nearly a 16-hour day.  Early today, as the half moon was setting, my dog, Ben, and I greeted the solstice watching the sun rise above the clouds and fog on Park Point, the great 5-mile stretch of sand beach along the southern shore of Lake Superior that forms the Duluth harbor.  Today of all days, I had expected a variety of others out on the beach to watch the sun rise on this longest day, but surprisingly we had the beach to ourselves the entire time, with the exception of the crows and seagulls that beckoned Ben into a run, only to wing into the air, leaving him wondering how they do that. 

I’ve had another memorable summer solstice on that beach.  On that day in 1994, just a few months after my heart transplant, I finally received the call from the transplant center that the rejection episode I’d had ten days before had stopped.  As I wrote then:

 “The tears poured out of me, a waterfall of tears at the gladness of the reprieve. I was alive!  I wasn’t dying now and I wasn’t dying soon. . . . I was alive I was alive I was alive. I wanted to shout it to the world, so I went to the one place in the world that I have always felt most fully alive – the great sand beach – and there on the night of the summer solstice Sam (my dog) and I ran the length of the beach, reveling in the tail ends of the last rays of the sun on that longest day. The beach stretched before us as the sun stretched out the day as my life now stretched before in a way that it hadn’t until that moment. I was going to live to live to live to love to shout to run to dance about in the waves we ran and ran and ran and ran and ran . . . As we slowly walked back, the moon began to rise, so looking in one direction we saw the setting sun and looking in the other we saw the rising moon. We were encircled in the heavens, and I was alive!”(Journey,  125-126).

My life has indeed stretched out before me since that time – 28 years without a hint of rejection.  I’m walking that beach now, more than running.  My dog, Sam, sadly had a much shorter life than my own.  Indeed, I’ve loved and lost two other dogs since that time, but I was grateful for Ben’s steadfast companionship this morning.  What a blessing, these canine companions.  I’ve not known a summer solstice without one, or two, for the past 45 years.

One other summer solstice holds a particular meaning for me.  Most likely it was 1964, the first year we spent at the cottage in Michigan which has been the summer gathering place for my family, the final resting place of my parents and more than one of the family’s dogs, and my soul home.  It was there on that day that I first witnessed the miracle of the transfiguration of the dragonfly nymph – an ugly, creepy, brown water creature – into the glorious, diaphanous winged creature we know as the dragonfly.  That day, dozens of them crawled out of the water and lined the dock posts and any other place they could find where the sun and wind would dry out their delicate, dewy wings enough for them to lift into the air on a breeze to begin their airborne existence.

Since that time, I’ve been quite enthralled with dragonflies.  I always count myself fortunate when I am able to observe their emergence from water to winged insect.  It is so stunning to witness their transformation. I feel my own heart lift off with them each time I see one take to the air for the first time.  What must that be like for them, I wonder – to live for five years in the water, and then in a matter of a few hours, to discover their wings and fly – an entirely new way of being in a brand new world.  In indigenous cultures, dragonflies are regarded as messengers of wisdom and enlightenment. In Chinese culture, they are seen as signs of good fortune. For me, they represent symbols of hope and possibility, that we too might be able to discover our own true nature, and rise above the trappings of society in all our brilliant colors and fly!  I’m reminded of the words to “A Piece of Sky,” from the musical, Yentl, sung as Yentl rids herself of the straitjacket of gender -- “The time had come  . . . to try my wings . . . I felt the most amazing things . . .The things you can’t imagine if you’ve never flown at all … I’ve a voice now; I’ve a choice now . . . If you can fly, you can soar!”

After weeks of mosquitoes so thick we’ve not been able to venture outside without being covered head to toe, draped in mosquito netting and bug suits, the arrival of the dragonflies on this summer solstice – and I’ve seen hundreds of them flying about – are a welcome sight for a very pragmatic and mundane reason – simply that their diet consists largely of  mosquitoes. I recently heard on a segment of MPR that dragonflies are particularly skilled and efficient predators, successfully catching and consuming 95% of their prey.  I suppose I should be glad that they are not their prehistoric ancestor, the griffinfly, that had a wingspan of more than a foot and were the largest insect on the planet,[i]  but rather are now simply creatures of delight, with the added benefit of balancing the insect biome around me.

On this summer solstice, it seems fitting to pause and give gratitude for the blessings of the sun – light; warmth; the very sustenance of plants that shade and delight and feed and literally give us the air we breathe through their ability to photosynthesize sunlight; the energy that more and more powers our electrical gadgets and heats our homes; and perhaps, starlight for others in some distant galaxy.  And for me on this day – the blessing of possibilities  -- of a long early morning barefoot walk along the shore with my faithful companion,  of the emergence of dragonflies, and of the simple joy of being alive.

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Notes

Bartlett, Elizabeth Ann. Journey of the Heart: Spiritual Insights on the Road to a Transplant. (Duluth, MN: Pfeifer-Hamilton, 1997).

Bergman, Alan and Marilyn. “A Piece of Sky” from Yentl, 1983.

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[1] Ancient Dragonflies Were Huge, Larger Than Today's Birds (roaring.earth)

In Memoriam: Rosemary Radford Ruether

Yet another of my great feminist and spiritual teachers has died.  Rosemary Radford Ruether, ecofeminist Catholic theologian, died on May 21st.  Her work challenged my thinking and gave me new understandings and perspectives. She was a prolific writer, authoring hundreds of articles and 36 books, and was the quintessential scholar and historian of world religions and ecofeminist theologies. A scholar of the scholastics, she examined three strains of Western thought: 1) the Hebraic tradition; 2) Platonic-Greek; and 3) Pauline-Augustinian in all their complexities to develop an understanding of the nature of Western thought and its implications for the domination of women, nature, and colonized others. As she described her own approach, she drew out the contradictions and complexities in these theologies, careful “to see both negative and positive aspects . . . and to be skeptical of exclusivist views on either side” (Women and Redemption, 222).  Her thought and writing were ever-expanding, and always striving “to see the dominant system of patriarchy, including its racism, classism, and colonialism, in critical perspective,” and to put herself “in places where in solidarity with its victims, I can see it from its underside” (Women and Redemption, 222). To this end, she brought together the ecofeminist theologies of women from around the globe, particularly the global south.[i] Her thought also grew to include critiques of militarism and corporate globalization.  Needless to say, I cannot begin to encompass all of her contributions here.  So, I will focus on the ways her thought has most deeply influenced and inspired my own.

I first encountered Ruether’s thought in the piece excerpted from her Sexism and God-Talk in Plaskow and Christ’s Weaving the Visions, in which she not only challenged the assumption of the male divine, but also argued that “male monotheism reinforces the social hierarchy of patriarchal rule, . . . [and] “begins to split reality into a dualism of transcendent Spirit (mind, ego) and inferior and dependent physical nature . . . whereas the male is seen essentially as the image of the male transcendent ego of God, woman is seen as the image of the lower material nature. . . .Gender becomes a primary symbol for the dualism of transcendence and immanence, spirit and matter” ( 251-252).  In a few sentences, she laid out the basic premise of the ecofeminist theological critique of Western thought.

In this piece, Ruether provided evidence of the many ways that the Bible itself challenges male monotheism, showing how Yahwism appropriates the goddess Asherah of its conquered peoples, incorporating female images of God -- God as mother and as woman in travail, particularly when describing the compassionate and loving aspects of the divine, as in the Hebrew word of compassion and mercy, rechem, meaning womb.  She also explored the wisdom tradition of the logos of Sophia, the paired images for God as male and female in the parables, and notions of Yahweh as the god of liberation from bondage.

Two points Ruether made in this piece had a particularly profound impact on my understanding.  The first is her discussion of the proscription of idolatry.  This proscription precludes any representation of the divine – pictorial or verbal – no images of God as the old man with the white beard and no verbal depictions of God as male or as Father.  What a profound and liberating recognition that was for me.

The other was Ruether’s critique of Christianity’s reliance on the divine as parental.  This model, she claimed, depicts God as a “neurotic parent who doesn’t want us to grow up,” in which the gravest sin against God is to become morally autonomous and responsible, creating “spiritual infantilism as a virtue” (160).  Her discussion of God as parent would always facilitate discussions with students about their issues with imaging God as a parent, when their experiences with their own parents were negative, dominating, or abusive.

Finally, in this piece she laid out the foundation of the ecofeminist theology that would underscore all of her subsequent work: “Feminist theology must fundamentally reject this dualism of nature and spirit” (161).  In the original work, Sexism and God-Talk, Ruether developed her ecofeminist theology, questioning the hierarchy of human over nonhuman nature as well as other structures of social domination, declaring the God/ess as the “primal Matrix, the ground of being . . . Spirit and matter are not dichotomized but are the inside and outside of the same thing” (Sexism, 85).

In the postscript to Sexism and God-Talk, Ruether offered a powerful analysis of the ways this dualism, in which “woman/body/nature” are regarded as inferior to “man/spirit/culture,” contributes to the subjugation of women.  The first of the three levels of subjugation of women  -- “the subjugation of her womb, of access to her body” -- seems particularly pertinent given the increasing curtailing of women’s reproductive freedom in this country.  Inscribed in ancient laws that continue to influence Western consciousness and law is the idea that women’s bodies and their offspring belong first to their fathers and then their husbands.  She cited Catholic church doctrine that birth is shameful, and that only through a second birth of baptism, administered by male priests, is “the filth of mother’s birth remedied” (260). But the following in particular still seems the perspective of many of the new anti-choice legislation arising in state after state: “Woman is taught that the worst of sins, the worst of crimes, is to deflect the male seed from its intended course in her womb. This is more sinful than rape, (emphasis mine), for the rape of a woman does not interfere with the purposes of the seed, while contraception wastes the precious seed and defeats its high purposes. . . . She must obediently accept the effects of these holy male acts upon her body, must not seek to control their effects, must not become a conscious decision maker about the destiny of her own body” (261).  It is this deep-seated, long-held belief that I believe is the true intention, even if subconscious, of those who would seek to restrict women’s reproductive autonomy.

The second level of women’s subjugation, exploited labor, has modified a bit since Ruether first wrote this forty years ago, but it is still the case that “black women, brown women, immigrant women toil silently in the background” (262), and for most women, the double day of paid employment and unpaid labor of tending children and households continues.

The third level, the rape of the earth and its peoples, has if anything increased. As she wrote, “The labor of dominated bodies, dominated peoples. . . provides the tools through which the earth is despoiled and left desolate. Through the raped bodies the earth is raped. Those who enjoy the goods distance themselves from the destruction” (263). The destruction of the Amazon rainforest to supply beef to distant consumers; the mining of the earth of African nations to supply gold, diamonds, and platinum to bejewel the bodies of the wealthy and leisured; the routing of oil pipelines through Native American reservations and ceded territories and the drilling of tar sands oil causing death and destruction to the indigenous populations and the earth so that the developed world can continue to burn fossil fuels to drive and fly and live in heated comfort – these are just some of the ways this subjugation plays out every day.

Yet, forty years ago, Ruether was hopeful for a metanoia – a true change of heart and consciousness – in which we would reject this dualism and instead live in right relation with each other and the earth.  Nevertheless, writing just a few years later, she would forewarn of the reality we are living today, urging that “we must effect this metanoia quickly . . . By 2030 CE it may be too late, or at least too late to save much of the life-capacity of the biosphere that could be saved now. Instead, we will find ourselves operating on the other side of global catastrophes, with much narrower options” (Gaia, 86).

In Ruether’s later work, she would incorporate her understandings of the new physics into her rejection of dualism, describing the matrix as “the dancing energy. . . .of the interconnections of the whole universe” (Gaia, 248).  She also proposed her key concept of “biophilic mutuality” – that all life energies have a desire to be in relationship with each other, and that the deep ontological structures that underlie this propensity are what she considered to be God. “God is not a ‘being’ removed from creation; . . . God is the source of being that underlies creation and grounds its nature and future potential for continual transformative renewal in biophilic mutuality” (Women and Redemption, 223.)

She believed in the deep interdependency and kinship of all beings, envisioning the good society of “communities of celebration and resistance,” in which true metanoia is practiced, replacing “the death system” with a “joy in the goodness of life” where we become good listeners of each other’s stories, and “take the time to sit under trees, look at water, and at the sky . . . and get back in touch with the living earth” (Gaia, 268-270).

Ruether’s thoughts on our ephemeral existence seem an appropriate benediction on her extraordinary life and work: “Then, like bread tossed on the water, we can be confident that our creative work will be nourishing to the community of life, even as we relinquish our small self back into the great Self. Our final gesture, as we surrender ourself in the Matrix of life, then can become a prayer of ultimate trust: ‘Mother, into your hands I commend my spirit. Use me as you will in your infinite creativity’” (Gaia, 253).

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Notes

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Gaia & God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing.  San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992.

  ______. Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization, and World Religions.  Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Pub., Inc., 2005.

______. “Sexism and God-Language,” in Plaskow, Judith and Carol P. Christ, eds. Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989: 151-162.

 ______. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. 10th Anniversary ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1983, 1993.    

______, ed. Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996.

______. Women and Redemption: A Theological History. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1998. 

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[i] See particularly Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion; Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization, and World Religions; and Women and Redemption: A Theological History.  

Sorrow

This morning listened to my son sing “Fire and Rain” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” in a way that I had never in all these years heard them.  These were the songs that defined my generation.  I have memories of sitting in the student union of my college campus, happily strumming my guitar, singing both these songs with a lightheartedness, reveling in the camaraderie and the harmonies. But today my son sang them with such reverence and tenderness that made me hear them in all their poignancy and sorrow — “How many deaths will it take till we know, that too many people have died?” In the wake of the recent mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde, the second anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, the rise of authoritarianism and neo-fascism in this country and abroad, the war Putin is waging on Ukraine, it was the sorrow that so needed to be honored and expressed. 

I have been so sorrowful for all the parents sending their children off to school each day, perhaps wondering if they will ever see them again, and even more for all the children growing up in such a world where they practice active shooter drills and can only enter their school through one door and metal detectors.  Such a different world from my own carefree school days, and even my son’s. But mine was a privileged world. I think of all the children, and parents who saw their children abducted and sent to Indian boarding schools, where they faced physical and sexual abuse to the point of death, and of the those who survived, creating soul wounds whose legacy continues to this day.  I think of the Little Rock 9, and their parents, who daily faced harassment and abuse as they courageously integrated the all-white Central High School of Little Rock, Arkansas.  I think of the mothers of every African American child in this country whose lives are at risk simply by jogging down the street, hanging an air freshener on their rearview mirror, and simply lying asleep in their beds.  I think of the parents separated from their children at the border, hoping for a better life for their children who instead live in crowded cages. 

It was days after I first thought of children facing threats simply by going to school that I remembered my own brief experience of that kind of terror.  It was May 4, 1970, and  I was in high school at Kent State University School.  Driving into town that morning, we entered a world that reminded me of photos of Czechoslovakia during the 1968 uprising there – tanks, troops, low-flying helicopters. It seemed a town under siege.  Early on that morning, we had to evacuate the building due to a bomb threat.  We filed out and filled the practice fields adjacent to the school, in a somewhat jovial mood as we had a chance to get out of class on a beautiful May morning.  Yet as our choir director, in his effort to distract us from the real possibility of serious danger, engaged us all in singing upbeat songs, I was also very aware of the hundreds and hundreds of soldiers marching down the street, some of the 20,000 National Guard troops Governor Rhodes had sent to the campus of the same number of students following the burning of the ROTC building on campus a few nights before.

When we were finally allowed back in the building, we were locked in with guards posted at every entrance, so that none of us would try to sneak out to attend the planned noon rally on campus.  It was sometime after noon, probably around one, when rumors started flying of shots being fired on campus, and of a sniper on the roof of one of the campus buildings closest to our school.  We were herded into the cafeteria, despite its many windows, and told to huddle under the tables.  Finally it was decided that the school needed to be evacuated, but only out the farthest back door.  I was one of the ones helping all the little children -- we were a K-12 school -- get safely out the back to their awaiting parents’ cars and school buses.  When it was our turn to sneak out the back, I only felt a wave of relief as we were safely miles out of town.  It was several hours after that we would learn of the “four dead in Ohio.”  Those few hours gave me only the slightest taste of what would become a daily background threat in the lives of students and teachers in this country, and what so many living in war zones face without respite.

It was not the first, nor would it be the last, as the ensuing fifty years have only accelerated the pace and the carnage.  Ten days after Kent State, two African American students would be killed by police in their dormitory following a racial disturbance and protest on campus.  Six years later, a gunman would kill seven students in the library of Fullerton State in California. In 2007, a shooter killed 32 people on the campus of Virginia Tech.

I still remember where I was when I first heard the news of the Columbine shootings in 1999.  It was so unbelievable at that time, so shocking.  Over twenty years later it has become far too commonplace.  I found myself this morning checking the news for what I assumed would be yet another mass shooting. 

What have we become, I have been asking myself and others these past few weeks, and yet it seems this has for far too long been our story.  For the past several days I have been angry, frustrated, horrified, infuriated by the gun violence in this country, by those who continue to fuel it through their love affair with weaponry, their poisonous hatred, their glory in power; by those who refuse to take steps toward meeting the deep desire of the vast majority in this country who want an end to this madness. 

I have been unable to write about any of this until I heard my son sing this morning and his poignant rendering released all the tears and sorrow I have been carrying in my heart.  I would have wished a better world for him, he who heard, really heard the words first penned by my generation in both sorrow and in hope that those lyrics might change the heart of a nation.  May it be so now.

On Turning 70

“How strange this life had been. . . . I have wandered along strange paths. . . . And yet the path has been good. . . . But what a path it has been.  I had to experience so much stupidity, so many vices, so much error, so much nausea, disillusionment and sorrow, just in order to become a child again and begin anew. But it was right that it should be so; my eyes and heart acclaim it. . . . Whither will my path yet lead me? . . . whichever way it goes, I will follow it.” — Siddartha                                                                                                                          

As my 70th birthday approaches, I find myself welling up with tears.  Not the tears of sorrow, even trepidation, one might anticipate in crossing this threshold into “old age,” with its accompanying physical and mental declines and the nearing of mortality, but rather tears of wonder, gratitude, and amazement that I have lived this long.  How did I come to this passage?  I was never meant to live this long – and yet, here I am.

My first truly conscious encounter with mortality happened at the age of 20, when I was hospitalized with myocarditis and supraventricular tachycardia – heart conditions that quickly plunged me into a coma where I lived on the brink of death for four days.  I would spend a month in the hospital, at first not allowed even to read as that was considered too stressful on my heart.  I remember lying in that hospital bed pondering the meaning of life.  What was the point of it all?  Was it all futile?  I had barely begun and the end was hovering so close. Eventually even the sun would die out.  When I was finally allowed to read, I immersed myself in Albert Camus’s journals, writing at the age of 17 and 18 about the months he spent in hospitals with tuberculosis, when his heart was bursting with youth and longing to be out in sunshine playing his beloved soccer and swimming in the sea.  The previous spring, I’d probed the meaning and purpose of life with Camus’s The Rebel -- and now I was living, and dying, the source of his questions and his fervor.  In his youthful writings I’d found someone who understood the absurdity of being cut off from life just when the desire to embrace it all is surging in the intensity of youth, and I was no longer alone.

I would spend the following two months bedridden. I was not allowed even to raise my hands above my head.  In the next two bedridden months in my childhood home, at the peak of my Eriksonian stage of “independence” was once again utterly dependent on my mother – to wheel me to the bathroom, feed me, bathe me, wash and brush my hair. She, who so generously gave those months of her life to care for me was too often the object of my outbursts of frustration.  I spent many daylight hours contemplating my mortality, the preciousness and the shortness of life, and my nights dreaming of running.  That time changed me. No longer taking any day, or step, or beloved person for granted, I lived with an intensity that sometimes frightened people away. 

I would receive several reminders of the precarity and preciousness of life over the next months and years – more ambulance runs, more hospitalizations, a full cardiac arrest at the age of 21, another at 37, 38, 39– this was no easy ride. The automatic implantable defibrillator designed to shock my heart should my heart rate rise too high was more of a torture device than a source of comfort and reassurance. Eventually, I was put on a transplant list. During this time, I was raising my young son, each night tucking him in wondering if I would make it through the night, each morning grateful for another day with him.  When I had a “dry run”  -- meaning that after helicoptering to the Cities and being prepped for surgery, being told that the heart wasn’t good enough --  Sophia, my transplant coordinator, said, “We want you to be able to see Paul graduate from high school.”  At that point, that was 14 years away.  The average life span of a heart transplant recipient was five years post-transplant.  At 41, I did receive a heart transplant – a gift of life from one who lost hers far too young at the age of 9. Not only did I watch my son graduate from high school, I watched him graduate from college, hooded him when he received his Master’s, have been an attentive audient at countless plays, concerts, recitals, and danced at his wedding. 

I’ve been able to have a full life of marriage and family, of teaching hundreds of amazing students, of ever-expanding, ever-deepening community and lifelong friendships.  I’ve worked on projects and marched in protests for peace and feminism and the environment and social justice. I’ve accompanied people in their birthing and in their dying, and all the dances with joys and sorrows in between.  I’ve witnessed the beauties of the world --each sunrise an exquisite gift that leaves me with prayers of gratitude that I lived to see this day.

I have not lived the life that as child I imagined I would.  Indeed, my life has taken me down many strange, unexpected, surprising, and wondrous paths. Who would I have been, I have wondered, had not my path not been diverted by illness at such a young age, had I not lived with such awareness of the precarity and preciousness of life for the past fifty years?  Who would I have been had I not read Camus at a critical time in my life and found the ethic which has informed my worldview and my actions?  Or gone on that first peace march? Or been changed by the first Earth Day? As Susan Griffin writes: “In a culture that values individuality and self-reliance, we forget that as unique as it is, the self is also built from received ideas, conventions, historical influences, social habits, and common designs. We are always with one another; made from one another; entering others we do not know . . . receiving elements from strangers we will never meet or who are long gone from this earth” (260). Who would I have been had I not lived in this particular time in history? Or had not found feminism, had not read Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Susan Griffin, bell hooks, Carol Christ? Who would I have been had I not met this person, taken this class, accepted an invitation to make music with these women, marched in this protest and gone to that rally, heard this speaker, or attended this play, or been in rich relationship with each of the beautiful souls I have encountered in my life?  Who would I have been had I not been so richly taught by indigenous elders and so deeply welcomed? 

Who would I have been had I not lived in this place of such stunning beauty, of ancient rocks, towering pines, and the powerful lake with which I fell in love as a child and instinctively recognized as my true home? We inter-are with every energetic being and moment in life.

I have lived through some of the best of times, and the worst of times – with illness, loss, grief, mistakes, political and social upheavals of hope and deep dismay for the world -- but mostly I’ve lived a life richly blessed with the privileges of food and shelter and education, the very best of friends and family, the shared understanding and laughter that come from decades-long friendship, meaningful work, opportunities continually to learn and grow and create, and the love of dogs. For all of this, and for all of you who have befriended, taught, supported, and loved me so well, I am profoundly grateful.

My mother always taught me to leave a place better than I found it.  I’ve pondered that often in the past few weeks.  I’ve spent much of my life trying to do just that -- rebelling against injustices of all sorts to create a more egalitarian, peaceful, respectful world.  At this juncture, it is difficult not to feel a bit of futility in my life’s work, for patriarchy, hierarchy, hate, environmental destruction, corrosive ways of interacting with each other seem even stronger now than when I began in all seriousness to dedicate my life to their eradication.  Even the Women’s Studies program that I spent much of my life creating and building, is fading away. But this was the lesson bequeathed to me by Camus – that even though the rock may keep rolling back down the hill, one persists, for the meaning comes in doing the work itself. “This insane generosity is the generosity of rebellion, which unhesitatingly gives the strength of its love and without a moment’s delay refuses injustice. Its merit lies in making no calculations, distributing everything it possesses to life and to the living. It is thus that it is prodigal in its gifts to generations to come. Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present. Rebellion proves in this way that it is the very movement of life . . . Thus it is love and fecundity or it is nothing at all” (Rebel,304).  I am inspired as well, by my students -- hundreds of them, thousands – each doing so much amazing work in the world – each a ripple from a stone or two I may have tossed into their waters -- continuing the work of repairing and healing the world.  The world is continually made better by them.  I think of my son – a most gracious, loving, forgiving, justice-seeking, honorable man – and I know the world is better for his being in it.

Students and alums from my last lecture

As I leave my 60s and enter my 70s, I have perhaps finally earned the title of Crone – the last of the female trinity – maiden/mother/crone. “Crones are the long-lasting ones,” wrote Mary Daly. “The status of Crones is not determined merely by chronological age, but by Crone-o-logical considerations. A woman becomes a Crone as a result of Surviving early stages of the Otherworld journey and therefore having dis-covered depths of courage, strength, and wisdom in her Self”(16). Cronedom comes with its responsibilities – to create, to connect, to be in conversation, to pass on, to share the wisdom that comes from age, always with the awareness that I have so much more to learn. Among the lessons that have come with old age are the importance of letting go of past grievances, of living into the moment, of extending graciousness for people’s foibles and missteps – I suppose my own included, of seizing every opportunity to extend love and embrace life. Returning to Siddartha, like him I’ve learned “. . . that love is the most important thing in the world. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect” (119).

In my hospital bed at the age of 20 I resonated with Camus’s words, “There is a will to live without refusing anything life offers: the virtue I honor most in the world” (Lyrical 167). Or as Cris Williamson put it in song: “Come to life like a warrior/ nothing will bore yer/ You can be happy/Let in the light it will heal you/ and you can feel you/ sing out a song of the soul.”

Such a gift, this life. I am so grateful to have had so many years of it.  I recently had a reminder of the precarity and preciousness of life, once again finding myself in the hospital after a 28-year hiatus.  I had the great good fortune to be placed in a room overlooking Lake Superior, and on the night I was there, the moon rose full and bright over the lake.  I urged every phlebotomist and nurse who came in to poke and prod and check my vitals to turn off the lights before they left, and take a moment to take in the marvel of the moonlight.  I didn’t want them to miss it.  I later remembered how I would do the same with  the women on my college freshman dorm hall, whom I would awaken early whenever there was a spectacular sunrise. (Most were not pleased.)  Life was not to be missed!

And so it is with humility and great gratitude that I embrace turning 70, grateful for every precious day. In the 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 . . .

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Notes

Camus, Albert. Lyrical and Critical Essays. New York: Vintage, 1970.

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

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