In Search of the Light

Today, December 13th, heralds the Swedish “Festival of Lights” -- St. Lucia’s/Lussi’s Day.  Before I moved to Minnesota, I had never heard of the celebration of Saint Lucia Day, but here in the land heavily populated by Swedish, Finnish, and Norwegian immigrants, it is widely celebrated.  Saint Lucia, whose name means “light,” was born into a wealthy, noble family in Sicily, and raised by her mother as a Christian.  In hopes of curing her mother of illness, she pledged her virginity to God and planned to distribute her dowry to the poor.  According to the legend, her spurned betrothed reported her to be a witch to the Roman authorities who sentenced her to a life of prostitution. However, when the time came to take her to the brothel, she was immovable. Neither was she able to be consumed by fire.  Finally, she was executed by sword in 304, and later was venerated as a saint by the Catholic Church.

According to Swedish legend, after her death a ship carrying a young woman believed to be Lucia, "clothed in white and crowned with light," appeared on Swedish shores during a great famine.  There she distributed food and clothing to the needy, carrying candles on her head in order to carry more food, endearing her to the Swedish people. At some point, probably during the time of the witch-burnings, another less-known legend of Lucia circulated that she was Adam’s first wife, who, just as St. Lucia refused her betrothed, left Adam. Like Lucia, she was accused of being a witch who rode at night with her accompanying spirits, the Lussiferda. Her name was also seen as connecting her to Lucifer, which is in line with the beliefs at the time that witches consorted with the devil.  In addition, she was considered to be the goddess who helped birth babies, bringing them from the dark into the light – another connection with the demonization of midwives at that time.  During this period, on Lussinatta – or Lucy’s Night – families huddled inside, keeping watch all night to protect themselves and their children from Lussi’s evil powers. But this part of the legend has long since been forgotten, and Lussi continues to be celebrated on her feast day of December 13th. Once thought to be the longest night of the year, her celebration ushers in the coming of the light and the Christmas season. Girls dressed in white with red sashes, wearing wreaths of lighted candles on their heads, process into the hall, sanctuary, or family living room, carrying coffee and lussekatt (saffron buns) to be given in honor of she who gave food to the poor.

This year it seems we need the light more than ever. The approaching winter has felt darker than usual.  Here in the north, where usually we are blanketed with snow this time of year, this year we have none.  All around town people are putting up holiday lights, but without the snow to reflect the light, the beams and sparkles of light do not carry.  Without the softening effect of billows of snow, they can even seem a bit garish.

But it is not just the lack of snow that renders these days darker.  With the wars raging in the Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, Sudan and smaller conflicts around the world; a politics of division, ignorance, and hate rising alarmingly throughout this country; the ongoing climate crisis -- these can seem dark days indeed, rendering our attempts at holiday cheer a bit garish as well.

And yet, we go in search of light, both physical and metaphysical.  Here in Duluth cars line up for more than a mile to get to “Bentleyville,” a walking tour of more than five million lights in the shapes of Christmas trees, poinsettias, snowmen, Santas, reindeer, snowflakes, and archways covered in lights.  It’s become one of the city’s main tourist attractions, drawing people from hundreds of miles away.[i]

This year, the heavens are providing their own light display.  With the current solar storms, we’ve been blessed with night after night of “northern lights” – the Aurora Borealis.  While they’ve eluded my search so far this year, my Facebook page lights up nearly every morning with photos from friends who have seen them.  People will stay up far into the night to catch these magical curtains of light in their pink and green array – a truly magical sight. 

Religious celebrations around the world centered in the lighting of lamps and candles abound this time of year. The Hindu festival of lights, Diwali, celebrates the victory of light over darkness with the lighting of row upon row of lamps. Each night of the Jewish holiday of Hannukah, an additional candle in the menorah is lit, commemorating the miracle of one jar of oil lasting long enough – eight nights – to rededicate the temple after the Maccabees won it back from the Greek invaders. Each day of Kwanzaa, families light one of the seven candles in the kinarah, each candle dedicated to one of the seven principles of Kwanzaa – unity, self-determination, responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. During each of the four weeks of Advent, Christians celebrate the coming of the birth of Jesus by lighting one of the four candles in the Advent wreath – the light of hope, of love, of joy, and of peace. Solstice traditions vary considerably, but in our community celebration of the winter Solstice, each took turns lighting one of the thirteen Solstice candles, dedicating it to their hopes for the new year, and then jumping the Solstice fire, leaving the woes of the past behind and with good wishes for the year ahead.

The flames symbolize the light we are truly seeking – the light of hope for a darkened world. In pre-pandemic days, every Wednesday evening of Advent, I played music for “Prayers Around the Cradle.”  It was a meaningful time of contemplation in the darkened sanctuary, with the reading of short inspirational verses, the singing of Taizé chants, and the lighting of candles – each with a blessing or prayer. By the end, the sand tray table would be ablaze with light, carrying our hopes for the world and loved ones near and far.­­ Some of us would stay long, listening to each other, providing comfort, or simply taking in the light.  No matter what cares or concerns I may have been holding, I always felt lightened by the time together.

As feminist Jewish scholar Ivy Helman wrote of the celebration of Hanukkah: “We don’t need the temple to bring more of the divine essence into the world.  Rather we need each other. . . . For us now, the Holy One indwells more in this world the more we bring: hope into a hopeless situation; friendship into a lonely situation; love into a loveless situation; care into a difficult situation. . . “[ii]

 I saw this the other day as our local chapter of Grandmothers for Peace distributed food and warm clothing to anyone in need.  On Friday noons, they join with Women in Black[iii], standing in silent vigil calling for a ceasefire in the Middle East.  I see in these actions both faces of Lucia/Lussi – women claiming power, standing up to the authorities, immovable, and also spreading the light that we are most seeking at this time – the light of care, of peace, of love.

 My favorite part of the Christmas Eve service is the traditional candle lighting ceremony, when, while singing “Silent Night,” we pass the flame, one person to the next, until all the sanctuary is filled with light. Certainly this sharing of the light of love is the light we seek.  All it takes is for us to find that light within ourselves and pass it on to someone else. In the words of the children’s hymn, “If I light just one candle, and you light just one, too, and we pass the flame from wick to wick, from us to you and you. And if we keep it going around the world, you’ll see the world is glowing with the light that came from you and me! With one candle, just one candle. Yes, one candle burning bright. With one candle, just one candle, we can fill the world with light.”

[i] For more information on and photos of Bentleyville, see Bentleyville "Tour of Lights" (bentleyvilleusa.org)

[ii] In a post written for the “Feminism and Religion” blog, Helman wrote of her struggle with the celebration of militarism in the original Hanukkah commemoration of the military victory of the Maccabees over the Greeks. Ultimately, however, she realized this was only a part of the celebration and that the true meaning of Hanukkah is in bringing the indwelling of God back into the temple and the world.

[iii] Women in Black was formed by Israeli women in 1988 after the First Intifada, in concern over what they considered to be serious violations of human rights by Israeli soldiers in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Clothed in black, they stood in silent vigil every Friday in central Jerusalem.  Since that time, the movement has grown to nearly 10,000 anti-war activists around the world.

Beaver Moon

The full Beaver Moon last week was truly spectacular.  The nights were clear and cold, the moon so big and bright.  As I drove north out of the Twin Cities, it rose directly ahead of me, huge and rosy orange.  It kept me company all the way home. When I crested the top of Thompson Hill, it lit up the city below, its beams sparkling across the great expanse of water beyond, welcoming me home. Bentleyville had nothing on that moonlight.[i]

I didn’t need to Google “Beaver Moon” to know the reason behind the name, (though Googling did confirm my guess.)  The beavers have been very busy this time of year as they prepare their dams and huts for the long winter ahead. Along the Amity, where I walk nearly every day, they’ve moved upstream and have been cutting down hundreds of trees, building a new and bigger dam than the series of dams that were destroyed either by the DNR or by the huge rain event a few months ago.  Their lumbering capacity is truly impressive, toppling trees a foot or more in diameter. And it’s not just the Amity.  I’ve seen evidence of their activity in every stream I’ve walked across the length of the city — from the Amity in the east to the West Branch of Merrit Creek in Piedmont Heights to Kingsbury Creek and the St. Louis estuary in the far west.

Undoubtedly regarded as destructive by human residents, either the DNR or the city park department, not sure which, keeps attempting to keep them at bay, removing their dams, trapping them and moving them out of the city.  Years ago, they moved a large family of beaver upstream from the section of the Amity, where they had been living for several years, to what was then a relatively unpopulated part of the Amity. There they lived happily for a few decades, creating a huge beaver pond that provided a home for waterfowl in the summer and a wonderful skating rink for people of all ages in the winter.  However, after the bike trail was built along the edge of the pond and beavers continually cut down trees that blocked the bikers, the dam was destroyed and the beavers trapped and moved.

It was a few months later that my dog, Ben, ran squealing and yelping out of the Amity where he’d been romping with another dog, blood streaming down his rear leg.  A friend and I tried to staunch the bleeding with no luck.  Our only alternative was to get him to the vet as quickly as possible.  By the time we’d made it more than the mile back to the car and to the vet, Ben had lost so much blood that his tongue and gums were white.  The vet wasn’t sure he’d make it through surgery.  At the time, the vet asked me if there were any beavers in the stream, and I told him I hadn’t seen any beavers in that section of the Amity for years.  Fortunately, Ben made it through.  No vital nerves, muscles, or blood vessels had been cut. The vet said it was a clean cut -- looked to be metal of some kind, but there was another deep puncture wound as well, farther up his leg, that looked curved and somewhat triangular. 

My husband and I went in search of what we suspected was an old metal trap or an old saw, but when we got to that section of the stream what we found instead was a large mama beaver[ii] swimming directly toward us, warning us that we were intruding.  Apparently some of the beavers upstream hadn’t been trapped, and had made it downstream, where they must have been starting to make a new home.

I read a lot about beavers after that.  I discovered that the vet was right about the clean cut being metallic.  Beaver teeth are filled with iron, making them bright orange and incredibly sharp, which is how they are able to fell such huge trees. The incisors are curved and somewhat triangular, forming the deep puncture wound Ben suffered. While not particularly aggressive, beavers will attack animals, human and otherwise, when feeling threatened.  Just a dog’s (or person’s) presence in the water at the wrong time and place makes it vulnerable to attack.  Beavers tend to latch on, and can kill by dragging the threatening intruder under the water and drowning them, or if they lacerate the femoral artery, their victim will quickly bleed out, as happened to a man trying to photograph one.

Beaver hut

Beavers mate for life, every year birthing litters of one to six kits who live together with them until they are about three, at which time they move out to find mates of their own.  They are the largest of North American rodents, and like all rodents, their teeth never stop growing so they need to chew to keep their teeth at a manageable size.  And chew they do.  They cut down trees incessantly, especially in the fall, creating and maintaining the dams which provide the depth of water needed to secure an underwater entrance to their huts, protecting them from the many predators who find their meat quite a delicacy.  According to environmental engineer Alice Outwater, sometimes it seems they also build dams “just for fun” (23). Herbivores, beavers also stockpile cut trees for winter food, feasting on the inner bark all winter long.

While I’ve been upset with developers who have cut down large swaths of local forests to build condos and big box stores, I can’t extend the same umbrage to the beavers, despite the fact that they have cut down hundreds of trees by my beloved creek.  Beavers are considered “keystone species,” critical to the survival of most of the other species in their ecosystem. As a result of their dam building, beavers create wetlands. Being ecotones – places of transition between two diverse communities – wetlands are rich in life – frogs, herons, migrating ducks, muskrats, moose, deer, and plants ranging from large fir trees to cattails to the tiniest of plankton – algae, fungi, bacteria.  The phytoplankton feed on impurities in the water, while the slowed water allows sediment carried by streams to settle. The wetlands clean the water to crystal clear, while also building layers of rich topsoil.  They also act like a sponge, soaking up water during storms and releasing it slowly during drier times, allowing it to seep into aquifers below rather than run off into the sea.

It’s estimated that prior to European contact two hundred million beavers lived throughout North America, from the Arctic to Mexico (with the exception of the swamps of Louisiana and Florida where they were killed off by alligators), creating vast wetlands and feeding the great aquifers. But after colonization, Europeans’ insatiable desire for the treasured beaver fur, first to warm them under beaver robes, but later simply for the fashionable beaver hats, led to the decimation of the beaver population from east to west across the continent. By the 1840s, the North American beaver was nearly extinct.  Today beavers number only seven to twelve million, found mostly around the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River valley.  Their demise has brought a decline in the amount and quality of water, the erosion of topsoil, massive damage from flooding, increased droughts, and decreasing numbers of the many species of plants and animals that depends on wetlands to survive.  Vast areas of the US that were once water-rich are now arid as a result.   

In England and Scotland, where beavers were hunted to extinction a century or two before Europeans arrived in the Americas, beavers mysteriously have reappeared and, to the chagrin of some farmers, are now a “protected species,” with an eye to reversing the severe droughts that have plagued Great Britain of late.  However, in the US, beavers are not considered an endangered species. Considered by many to be a “nuisance animal,” beavers continue to be trapped and killed in the US, including nearly 25,000 by the US Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Service in the last year alone. However, with increased awareness of the many benefits beavers bring, more and more efforts have been made to restore and protect them. 

Rather than bemoaning the fact that the beavers seem to be destroying every tree in sight along the Amity, I remind myself that they are hard at work creating wetlands teeming with life, cleaning the water, preventing floods, droughts, and wildfires, and welcome them.  They will be quiet now for many months to come, keeping cozy warm together in their huts and growing fat on their rich stores of wood pulp, but they’ll be back again, busily cutting down trees next fall, under the Beaver Moon.

[i] For those not from Duluth, Bentleyville is a huge holiday light display with over five million lights in the shapes of Christmas trees, snowflakes, Santas, reindeer, and huge arched walkways, drawing thousands of people every year.

 [ii] Female beavers tend to be larger than males, weighing about sixty pounds.

On "Braiding Sweetgrass"

This year marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. In honor of that, Milkweed Press asked readers to submit their thoughts on how Braiding Sweetgrass has changed them.  Braiding Sweetgrass has become a bible of sorts for me. It has been with me now for so many years it's difficult to distinguish all the ways it has changed the way I see or act in the world from the resonances with those things I have always believed to be true. All I know is that my entire being reverberates with “yes!” in its reading.

I first learned of Braiding Sweetgrass listening to Kimmerer’s 2015 interview with Krista Tippett on On Being. I was immediately drawn in by her discussion of “the grammar of animacy,” referencing her Potawatomi language in which nouns are not gendered, but rather understood as either animate or inanimate.  Most of those things we in the Western world understand as “inanimate” – rocks, trees, wind, water, soil, fungi, moss – indigenous cultures regard as alive, as living relatives.  Having spent so much of my life working to change the cultural perceptions and limitations created by gendered language, I know full well the power of language to shape our understandings of the world.  The more recent emphasis in Western culture on careful use of pronouns to describe a person’s gender identity underlines this as well.  Kimmerer suggests we move beyond the use of “he, she, and they” to a far more inclusive pronoun of “ki” –from the Potawatomi word aki meaning “land” or “earth,” with the plural being “kin” – which I love.  I honestly don’t know whether the grammar of animacy has changed my perception of the world, or expressed what I have always known to be true – that we are all kin, all earth-dwelling living beings, but it has given me the language for it, and for this I am deeply grateful.

Which brings me to the practice of gratitude.  In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer shares the Haudensaunee daily practice of offering gratitude to the living world in “the Words that Come Before All Else.”  Each day begins with the giving of thanks – “ . . . to our Mother the Earth, for she gives us everything that we need for life . . . , to all the waters of the world . . . , to all of the Fish life . . , to the Plant life . . ., the Food plants . . . , the Medicine Herbs . . . , the Trees . . . ., the beautiful animal life . . . , the birds . . . , the Four Winds . . . , the Thunder Beings . . . , the Sun . . . ,  to our oldest Grandmother, the Moon,  . . ., the Stars . . . , the enlightened Teachers . . . , The Creator, or Great Spirit . . . . and all the gifts of Creation”(108-115). Each one is named and their gifts acknowledged in lyrical detail.  On those days I remember, offering the Words that Come Before All Else has become an important practice for me, as I recall and give thanks for all the ways in which earth, water, plants, animals, stars, and spirit in all of their various forms and manifestations bless my life every day. Doing so fills my life with deep gratitude and appreciation, and is also an important reminder to me every day to do what I can to return the gift.

Kimmerer weaves the lessons of reciprocity throughout her book.  This was not a new idea to me.  Years ago, I wrote about reciprocity as one of the essential qualities of friendship.[i]  I had also previously learned from indigenous elders the importance of returning the gifts of wisdom and teachings with gifts of tobacco and sweetgrass. But what Braiding Sweetgrass instilled in me was a new recognition of the importance of reciprocity with the gifts of the earth – whether pecans or maple syrup, sweetgrass or strawberries -- by taking care of the soil and water, protecting them from harm, planting new seeds. Reciprocity, she writes, is the very basis of our kinship with the world.  In addition, her recognition of “writing as an act of reciprocity with the living land” (347), has helped assure me that in my writing I am not doing nothing, and inspires me to continue to use this gift of language as one way to act on my responsibility to nurture and protect the land.

Kimmerer’s articulation of the Honorable Harvest has guided my harvesting of wild fruits and fiddleheads, but more widely it also has tempered my consumption of food, durable goods, energy, water. Among the guidelines, I carry these in my heart now like a mantra: “Never take the first. Never take the last. Take only what you need.  Leave some for others. Harvest in a way that minimizes harm. Never waste what you have taken. Share. Give thanks. Give a gift in reciprocity. Sustain the ones who sustain you.” (183).

The story of the Windigo – the human who has become a cannibal monster which transforms its victims into cannibals, too -- makes me want to take care not to join forces with it.  As she writes, “The more a Windigo eats, the more ravenous it becomes. It shrieks with its craving, its mind a torture of unmet want. Consumed by consumption, it lays waste to humankind” (305). Undoubtedly, I have been bitten by it at various times in my life, presenting my wants in the guise of needs, seducing me to take far more than my share, consuming for the sake of consumption itself. Her cautionary tale leads me to question in what ways my actions, or inactions, make me complicit with the Windigo, or not.

Buckthorn

She likens the Windigo to the invasive plant, buckthorn, which “takes over the forest, starving other plants of light and space. Buckthorn also poisons the soil, preventing the growth of any species but itself. . . “ (378). I’ve watched this takeover in places I love.  Just over the hill lies Hartley Park that once for me was a lovely forest in which to wander. But now one can’t see the forest for the buckthorn that has filled the entire tract of land, destroying all the diverse plant life that once grew there.  I’ve seen it slowly invading all the forests here but one.  A year ago we cut and burned all the buckthorn on our property, only to have it grow back in multiple shoots at every stump, not unlike the ways in which greed for profit and fossil fuels seems to proliferate with every attempt to shut down a pipeline or install solar power. We’ve since learned better elimination techniques, and hopefully we are slowly routing it out.  Certainly there is a lesson in this for myself, of the need to completely eliminate the roots of the destructive consumerism in me lest the desires multiply in response.  “Gratitude,” Kimmerer writes, “is a powerful antidote to Windigo psychosis” (377). This, plus a refusal of participate in an economy that destroys the earth may be the undoing of the Windigo. Such refusal, she acknowledges, is “easy to write, harder to do,” but reading and re-reading Braiding Sweetgrass continues to inspire my determination. 

So many other teachings have touched me, but I cannot conclude without mention of the word that she introduced forever into my vocabulary – puhpowee – the Anishinaabe word for “’the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight’” (49). I have had a love affair with mushrooms for decades.  One of my favorite photographic subjects, alive with variety of size, shape, and color, they always astonish.  If there were a word like onomatopoeia for a word that sounds exactly like the action of something, I would use it to describe puhpowee, for it so accurately depicts the magical ways that mushrooms thrust up through the ground, literally overnight, appearing as if out of nowhere. They swell and blossom most in a soaking rain, so on rainy days I would take my young nephews on mushroom hunts where we would find our treasures large and small, bright and beautiful, clumped and singular and in enchanted fairy rings. Mushrooms are but the most obvious and outward manifestation of the fungal networks that almost invisibly make life possible. Neither plant nor animal, but a class unto themselves, fungi long ago paired with plants to create life-giving soil from bare rock.[ii] (In a more personal way, the immunosuppressant drug that daily makes life possible for me is also formed from fungus, as evident in its name – cyclosporine.) In their colorful arrays and magnificent generosity, fungal fruits demand our attention and our appreciation. I am grateful now to call them by a name most fitting for their powers of preternatural arising – puhpowee.

The influence of Braiding Sweetgrass on my life has been immeasurable and is ongoing. Like the puhpowee, these are but a few of the blossoms fruiting forth from its networks of nurture that continue to permeate my being. Each time I read it, I learn something new, gain important perspectives. One of the four sacred plants of the Anishinaabe, the others being tobacco, sage, and cedar, sweetgrass – wiingaashk -- is used to heal and purify, to create calm, peace, and harmony.  Like the sacred plant, Braiding Sweetgrass is an ongoing gift of sacred wisdom that heals and brings peace and harmony, its fruits emerging like the puhpowee in surprising variety and beauty.

Sources

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

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

NOVA | Ancient Earth: Life Rising | Season 50 | Episode 13 | PBS

[i] See the chapter on friendship in my Rebellious Feminism.

[ii] To learn of this in greater detail, see the NOVA episode “Ancient Earth: Life Rising.”

 

" . . . the world will not stop being beautiful": On Despair, Precarity, and Hope

The snow is gently falling this morning, covering the bare branches and ground with a blanket of white – a gift from the heavens on this day when I am feeling such despair for the world.  The unspeakable horror of the ongoing death and destruction in Gaza wrenches my heart. “How many deaths will it take till they know that too many people have died?”  Bob Dylan’s lyrics from another time echo in my mind.  Have we learned nothing in all this time?

The rise of militarism goes hand in hand with the rise of misogyny.  The Dobbs decision[i] was just the beginning it seems.  So much hangs in the balance today, election day.  In my former home state of Ohio, securing abortion rights in the state constitution is on the ballot. In my hometown today, the re-election of the first female mayor, a strong feminist who has done so much for the homeless and for climate change, is being significantly threatened.  The new Speaker of the House is a “Christian Nationalist,” who seeks to undermine rights for women and LGBTQ folk while backing big oil and the NRA.[ii] And the country seems poised to hand the presidency back to a racist, misogynist, anti-democratic white male who has 91 criminal counts against him. What has become of us? What has become of the feminist/womanist future we seemed to be on the cusp of not so long ago.

The parallels between the long occupation and ceaseless bombing of the civilian population of Gaza and the treatment of the indigenous population in this country haunt me – the slaughter, the forced removal, the land theft and the continued shrinking of lands whose preservation was supposedly guaranteed by now broken treaties, the destruction of sources of food and water, the particular harm to women and girls witnessed still in the epidemics of domestic abuse, sexual assault and the missing and murder of Indigenous women.  The same mindset that casts certain peoples as “other” – as disposable – seems alive and well.  And so the questions repeat – have we learned nothing?  What has become of the feminist future we envisioned?

As if this weren’t enough, we are on the verge of a climate catastrophe as deadly as the end of the Permian era of vulcanization.[iii] We are seeing the same rise in global temperatures, decrease in oxygen levels and increased acidification of the oceans, and dying off the great coral reefs that led to the mass extinctions at the end of the Permian era. And yet, living in denial, or perhaps simply greed, we continue to burn fossil fuels at alarming rates.  As geophysicist Sonia Tikoo said, now “there’s no volcano – it’s just us.”  We’re not releasing as many greenhouse gases as occurred during that era, but we are releasing them at a much faster rate.  As climate scientist Priya Shukla said, “If the loss of life continues to go unchecked, we may very well be in the midst of another mass extinction on this planet.”[iv]

Susan Griffin’s words written in 1982 seem so applicable over forty years later.  “This is a difficult year. Prospects for women and the world look bleak. . . . It becomes part of sanity to fear that soon there will be no human life on earth.” Yet, she goes on, “But fearful as I am, there is joy in me.  While one eye sees disaster and the causes of destruction more clearly, the other eye awakens to beauty. . . . We are all connected. I know this.  . . . We are made from this earth. This is my hope” (20).

Hope is an essential quality of the human condition, refusing to refuse us.  The climate scientists and activists who contributed to Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua’s volume on climate change, Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility., fill its pages with hope. “Despair,” remarks Yotam Moran, “is the easy way out. Despair is also, quite simply, bad politics. . . . So what do we do when the world is ending? . . . We choose to face our despair -- to walk toward it and through it -- choose to take action, choose to build movements . . . because there are possibilities out there that we can’t simply see yet” (109-110). “What gives me hope,” writes Joëlle Gergis, “is that human history is full of examples of people across the ages who have risen to face the great challenges of their and time and succeeded against all odds. . . Every decision we make can be a decision to stop trashing the planet” (42-43). For co-editor Thelma Young Lutunatabua, choosing to give birth to a child in 2022 was an act of radical hope.  She encourages us not to “surrender to the disasters and corrupt politicians,” but rather to “surrender to the new works of social change already showing us hope and possibility” (196-198).  “It’s audacious and it requires tenacity to have a vision for a world we cannot materially see,” writes Gloria Walton. “It takes courage to challenge ways and build a better future” (57). Renato Redentor Constantino inspires that courage in us, writing, “ . . . when the sense of hope feels eclipsed . . . it is time to cast our own penumbral light .  . . To come forth . . . Because this is our moment. We are the crescendo“ (81).

I heard the same indefatigable hope in the words of every indigenous woman I interviewed for Making Waves, each one celebrating their resilience and resolutely proclaiming, “We are still here.”

I heard it as well in the words of a young Jewish girl in hiding for her life during the Holocaust. As a dear friend recently reminded me, we are of the “Anne Frank generation.” We read and re-read Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl at the same age she was when she wrote it.  And we believed with her that despite everything, people are really good at heart. We, too, along with her, “can feel the sufferings of millions,” and yet have wanted to believe with her, “that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again” (233). An optimism about our capacity for good was woven deep into our bones from an early age.

I see evidence of that capacity all around -- in resistance movements; in  global protests for a ceasefire; in humanitarian aid and healthcare providers working tirelessly to end suffering; in the efforts of friends, neighbors, and city officials to stem the tide of climate change – installing solar panels and heat pumps, planting trees, reducing consumption;  in kindnesses large and small; in the human desire to be of use; in the ability of a child’s smile to touch our hearts with joy.

Watching the NOVA series, “Ancient Earth,” learning in great detail of the planet’s evolution from rock to verdant life, from a frozen planet to one where tropical forests grew at the poles, to the remarkable series of climate and geological events that made human life on this planet possible makes the preciousness of this life and our response to its precarity seem all the more urgent and pressing. We squander it with war and woundings, consumption and cruelty, oppression and “othering” of other species and our own. And yet, as Rebecca Solnit wrote, “the world will not stop being beautiful, not stop having sunrises and full moons, light pouring through clouds” (192), and delicate flakes of snow, dancing through the mourning, that lift us from our despair into the hope of action toward all we cannot yet see, but know to be possible.

Sources

“Ancient Earth: Inferno.” 2023. NOVA. Season 50. Episode 14. PBS.

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

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, No. 19-1392, 597 U.S. ___ (2022)

Dylan, Bob. 1963. “Blowin’ In the Wind.” The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.  Sony Music.

Frank, Anne. 1952. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. Trans. B.M. Mooyaart. New York: Doubleday.

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

McQuilken, Hillary & Meghna Chakrabarti. November 6, 2023. “The Influence of Christian Nationalism in American Politics.” On Point.  Boston: WBUR. NPR. The Influence of Christian nationalism in American politics | On Point (wbur.org)

Solnit, Rebecca & Thelma Young Lutunatabua. 2023. Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

[i] The Dobbs decision is the US Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that overturned Roe v. Wade and led to the denial of the right to abortion in nearly two dozen states.

[ii] The Influence of Christian nationalism in American politics | On Point (wbur.org)

[iii] The Permian era is the 47 million year geologic period that spans from 298.9 million years ago to 251.902 million years ago. The end of the Permian was marked by the release of vast volumes of CO2 into the atmosphere from the eruption a large region of volcanic rock in what is now Siberia known as the Siberian Traps.

[iv] These references are from the 2023 NOVA series, “Ancient Earth: Inferno.”

Remediation*

*the action of remedying something, of stopping or reversing harm

 All the blog topics I was considering writing about went on hold after October 7th when Hamas first attacked civilians in Israel, and Israel responded in kind, launching air strikes on civilians living in Gaza.  I have felt both a responsibility and a reluctance to write about the war.  The situation is so complex and such an unspeakable tragedy – acts of such terror and violence met with even greater violence and repressive measures; a people with such a deep history of being oppressed engaged in such long-term acts of oppression against their fellow human beings and neighbors; both traumatized peoples acting out of deep pain and woundedness. In the face of so much suffering, providing any kind of analysis feels distancing at a time when what we most need is to let the suffering move us to our depths.

 Distancing, a failure to feel in our bodies our connection to all that exists, is precisely what allows us to commit such acts of brutality. It is the literal distancing made possible through the development of missiles and aerial bombardment that enables the perpetrator of such destruction not to come face-to-face with the resultant slaughter and suffering.[i] It is the distancing of what ecofeminist Susan Griffin calls the Western “habit of mind,”[ii] the mind-body dualism alienating us from nature and from our very beings, that enables such destruction without feeling, the destruction of our fellow human beings, of other creatures, of the very earth that occurs in war. She argues that this habit of mind has necessarily led to the creation of the category of “the Other” that “has acted as a receptacle for the experience of nature the European mind would wish to deny” (Eros, 42). And it is the distancing of seeing those suffering not as fellow human beings, but as “other” -- something less than, not worthy of our consideration or compassion – that enables one to inflict such pain. 

 In their joint Palestinian-Jewish statement on the current situation in Gaza and Israel, the editors of Tikkun acknowledge how easy it is to slip into this “othering,” and seek its antidote:

 When we fall back into our separate and distinct identities we risk becoming part of the problem, not the solution. Both peoples suffer from ongoing trauma. We are all on high alert. The fear is palpable. And it is easy for us to objectify the 'other.' We seek a third path that neither perpetuates a xenophobic response nor sustains an unjust status quo. This moment calls us to slow down, sit with the pain and complexity, and grapple with our discomfort. It is a moment for digging deep, seeing across differences, and remembering our deep yearning for peace and justice. It is only through compassion and empathy that we will find a different way.[iii]

During this time, I happened to be listening to the chapter “Collateral Damage” in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, in which she draws the connections between the deaths and declining number of salamanders with the war in Iraq.  Echoing Griffin, she writes: “It has been said that people of the modern world suffer a great loneliness, a ‘species loneliness’ – estrangement from the rest of Creation. We have built this isolation with our fear, with our arrogance. . . .” She goes on to talk about how salamanders are “so very much ‘the other,’ cold, slimy creatures verging on repulsive to the warm-blooded Homo sapiens.”  She continues, “They bring us face to face with our innate xenophobia, sometimes directed at other species and sometimes directed at our own . . . .“  But helping salamanders safely to cross the road that cuts them off from the pond where they need to be, she says, “offers an antidote to the poison of xenophobia.  Each time we rescue slippery, spotted beings we attest to their right to be, to live in the sovereign territory of their own lives“ (358).  Compassion begins here. Overcoming our “innate xenophobia,” our fear of the other, requires going beyond the divides imposed by the Western habit of mind, beyond our species being to recognizing our connection to all that exists.

I feel this connection in my bones. It is immersion in this connection that offers both the antidote and the balm when that connection is ripped asunder. And so it was that in the midst of the turmoil of the world, my friend and I walked along the contours of the St. Louis Bay where in the calm waters and autumnal glories we found a peace and healing from the woundedness of the world. 

It made me wonder where in the current conflict the people of Israel and Gaza could find moments of peace. As if in answer, the Chorus of the besieged in Albert Camus’s play, State of Siege, cry out: “The sea, the sea! The sea will save us. What cares the sea for wars and pestilences?   . . . O vast sea spaces, shining solitude, baptism of brine. Ah, to be alone beside the sea, facing the blue expanse, fanned by the wind and free at last of this city sealed like a tomb, and these all-too-human faces clamped by fear!” (167). Indeed, this is what the sea has been for the people of Gaza.  In his 2022 interview with an NPR reporter living in Gaza following what was then the latest battle between Israel and Gaza militants, NPR reporter Daniel Estrin said that, “the sea is the one escape people in Gaza have from a tough daily life in between the wars, living under blockade by Israel and Egypt with widespread poverty.”  Fahid Rabah, an engineer at the sewage treatment plant, concurred, “We have more than 2 million people here in Gaza - and very crowded, very small area. And the only place that they can go breathe is the sea.” For years they were cut off from that one respite because the sea off Gaza was so polluted due to the lack of reliable electricity to run the sewage treatment plants. But prior to that most recent incursion Israeli officials had changed course and allowed for the equipment and reliable energy sources necessary to treat the sewage, and the waters had once again become swimmable. Now that power has again been cut off from the people living in Gaza, one must wonder what will become of the waters in the surrounding sea.

The polluted water doesn’t just stay in Gaza.  It also travels to Israel, affecting the desalination plant that supplies a fifth of Israel’s drinking water, as well as its beaches. The waters of connection run everywhere.  What affects one affects us all. Distance is an illusion, and a dangerous one.

Thealogian Rita Nakashima Brock urges us to feel the pain for the world, arguing that repression of that pain results in oppression, and that empathy with the suffering in the world is a precondition to the solidarity necessary for its healing. As she writes, it is “our capacity to suffer with the world [that] leads us to a sense of community with all of creation” (240).  

The only thing interrupting the peacefulness my friend and I found by the waters of St. Louis Bay was the intrusive noise of the dredging equipment out in the bay. Like the seas off Gaza, St. Louis Bay has been so polluted as to be designated a Superfund site — polluted by the dumping of toxic waste by US Steel — steel used in the manufacture of weapons and war planes; polluted by the failure to see the connection between ourselves and the rest of creation.  It will take years of remediation to restore it to wholeness. The plans for remediation of the St. Louis Bay include restrictions on dredging activities, for while dredging can be used to restore ecosystems by removing contaminants, the same dredging can cause contaminants in the sediment to leak into the water. It must be done with great care.

Dredging up the wounds of the past and present carries its dangers, but if done carefully, it can be restorative, if the wounds it uncovers are the wounds of connection that run through us all, revealing in Griffin’s words, that “every life bears in some way on every other” (Chorus, 144), if this “digging deep” is one that helps us to “see across differences, and remember our deep yearning for peace and justice.” Undoubtedly it will take years of remediation, but it is in our ability to see ourselves in others, in the waters, in the salamanders, in those we would label “enemy,” that we can find the sources of compassion that heal our lives.

Sources

A look at two sides of life in the Gaza Strip right now : NPR

Camus, Albert. 1958. Caligula & Three Other Plays. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Vintage Books.

Brock, Rita Nakashima. 1989. “On Mirrors, Mists, and Murmurs.” In Plaskow, Judith and Carol Christ, eds., Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. 235-243.

Gaza beaches safe for swimming after many years of warnings - Al-Monitor: Independent, trusted coverage of the Middle East

Griffin, Susan. 1992. A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War. New York: Doubleday.

Griffin, Susan. 1995. The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society. New York: Doubleday.

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

Remediation and Restoration Projects for the St. Louis River AOC | US EPA

Solidarity with Palestinians and Jews (google.com).

[i] For a thorough exploration of the changes in the nature of warfare with the invention of airplanes, missiles, and rockets, see Susan Griffin’s brilliant A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War.

[ii] Susan Griffin explores this “Western habit of mind” in her The Eros of Everyday Life.

[iii] For the full statement, see Solidarity with Palestinians and Jews (google.com).

Learning To Let Go, Again

I read my friend’s reflections on her now-grown daughter leaving home -- her exquisite and poignant reminiscences of her daughter’s first toddling steps toward her open arms and her now grown and confident steps away from them – while cuddling my grandson in my arms. I want to savor every moment of this precious being asleep in my arms, holding him close, breathing in the sweet scent of his body warm next to mine, and in the next instant, I’m cheering on his early attempts at lifting his body from the floor as he learns how to crawl away. The falling in love with complete abandon that is the gift of a child, the full open-hearted embrace, comes inevitably with loving them enough to let them go.

“To live in this world/you must be able/ to do three things:” wrote poet Mary Oliver, “to love what is mortal; to hold it/against your bones knowing/your own life depends on it;/and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”[i]

The letting go bears repeating because the instinct to grab and never let go is so strong. “Learning how to love differently is hard,” writes poet Marge Piercy, “love with the hands wide open love/with the doors banging on their hinges,/the cupboard door unlocked . . .It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch; to love and let/go again and again.”[ii] To let go again and again. The letting go bears repeating for in our lifetimes we do it again and again and again and again.

We let go of lost loves, dreams denied, plans gone awry, cherished friends, and places we’ve called home.  As the years go by, the letting go seems more frequent, but never easier.  These last few years have felt a torrent of leavings and letting go’s. After the 2016 election, I had to let go of the naïve illusion that this country was beginning to turn a corner on its racist, sexist, homophobic past. Not long after, I let go of my life’s work at the university, only to see it slowly become dismembered by those in power who had so long sought its demise.  Covid brought a letting go of my life in the community -- indoor gatherings, concerts, plays, dinners, weddings, and funerals – that continues to this day. 

But it is the letting go of beloved friends and family that is the hardest lesson. So many of my friends of long duration have left this earth in the past few years.  It was about three years ago to this day that I found one of my dearest friends barely conscious on her living room floor.  Had I known how close she was at that moment to death, and had it been my decision to make, I would have let her go in the quiet of that intimate moment between life and death, her hand in mine -- one final holding before her body released. But instead, the ambulance was called, the paramedics rushed in, and she was swept away in the ambulance.  Because I could not accompany her in those early days of Covid, she died soon after in the cold, harsh lights of the ER, surrounded by masked strangers.  I wish I had given her a better leave taking.

Then there is the long letting go of dementia which is slowly eroding the memories, capacities, and personalities of some of those to whom I am closest in this life.  Every time I say goodbye, I know that I will never see them again – not as they were, not as I’ve known them.  It is a cruel teacher.  I want to hold them close, beg them to stay with me, longing for the person I once knew and loved, loving them still and letting them go both at once.  It is so oddly painful to be both in their presence and miss them so intensely.  It is only now as I’m writing this that I’ve finally been able to acknowledge the grief enough to let go of the tears I’ve so long held back.

It seems it is the lesson of the season – of the cumulonimbus clouds letting go of their moisture; the buttercups and burdock their seed-filled burs; the maples, oaks, birches, and ash their leaves; the Haralson tree its apples; the milkweed pod its seeds. And they do it again and again. In their letting go, the living beings in our midst show us how to release graciously, without reservation, generously sharing their abundance and their gifts.

The Anishinaabe and other indigenous cultures practice the ceremony of the “give-away,” also known as the “potlatch” – a releasing of one’s treasures to others in the community. It is a vital part of sustaining relation, as well as of demonstrating leadership.  As I first heard indigenous elder Rayna Green say so many years ago, “power is given to those who give.”[iii]  And as Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “This is the fundamental nature of gifts: they move, and their value increases with their passage. . . . The more something is shared, the greater its value becomes.”[iv] I find such wisdom in this practice – a preparation for all the many letting go’s in life, until that final letting go.

For many years, on the last day of my Women and Spirituality class, my students and I participated in a small-scale version of this practice – each one bringing some treasured item they would then give away to someone else in the class.  Each time it tested my desires to possess and hoard. The greater the significance to me, the more difficult to release.  Yet, paradoxically, it also seems the greater the love, the more that love enables their release.  Is that not the wisdom of Solomon in recognizing the true mother as the one who renounced her claim to the child in order to spare their life?[v] Is that not the task of every mother, every parent – to love so deeply as to be willing, when the time comes, to let them go?

So many have told me that the wonderful thing about grandchildren is that you can have all the fun and play and giggles and glee, and then give them back to their parents.  But I don’t want to let go of this treasured time, this cherished child.  I want his sunshine morning smiles and his middle-of-the-night tears so easily calmed in the cradle of my arms. I want his adventures in eating and his bold efforts to move steadily toward the objects of his desire. I am not eager to let him go.

In the past two months, Marty has just begun to learn how to reach and grab. Every day he becomes more adept, more able to hold and not let go. So it begins. At the other end, with my aging arthritic thumbs and fingers, the ability of my hands to grab and grasp, to clutch and clasp, has diminished.  Perhaps this is the wisdom of my body. No sooner do we learn how to hold on tight than we begin to learn to release and gently let go.  

And so, with one hand we hold on, with the other we let go. As Mary Oliver sagely recognized, we need both the holding and the letting go, each equally motivated by love. 

Sources

Green, Rayna. 1990. “American Indian Women: Diverse Leadership for Social Change.” In Albrecht, Lisa and Rose M. Brewer, eds. Bridges of Power: Women’s Multicultural Alliances. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers. 61-73.

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

Oliver, Mary. 2017. Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver.  New York: Penguin.

Piercy, Marge. 1980. The Moon Is Always Female. New York: Knopf.

[i] “In Blackwater Woods,” Mary Oliver, Devotions.

[ii] “To have without holding,” Marge Piercy, The Moon Is Always Female.

[iii] I heard Rayna Green say this in her keynote at the 1988 conference of the National Women’s Studies Association in Minneapolis. The speech was since published in the anthology from that conference, Bridges of Power: Women’s Multicultural Alliances, 70.

[iv] Braiding Sweetgrass, 27.

[v] The reference is to the Biblical story of King Solomon’s resolution of a dispute between two mothers, each claiming to be the mother of the same child.  Solomon ordered the child to be cut in half and shared between the two.  Only one then gave up her claim to the child, and by her willingness to let her child go rather than be harmed, he knew her to be the true mother. Kings 1:3.

Once In a Super Blue Moon

You’d have thought it was the 4th of July the way people were gathering on the shore of the great lake Gitchee Gumee, some with coolers and lawn chairs, kids and dogs in tow, each claiming their spot — waiting for the viewing as if waiting for the fireworks.  But what we awaited was far more spectacular – the “once in a very blue moon”[i] — the second full moon in a calendar month, but also a “super moon” – so named because at this time when it is closest to the earth in its orbit it appears larger than usual. Super moons happen a few times a year – the next one will be in September -- and blue moons happen every two to three years, but super blue moons are rare. This one was probably the last in my lifetime since the next one will occur fourteen years from now in 2037.

My husband and our dog, as well as our son’s dog, aptly named Luna, made our way to the lake, finding our spot on the ancient grandfather rocks, joining the other moon gazers. A feeling of community celebration arose with the moon as we strangers to each other together watched the first light of rising moon with shared anticipation and appreciation. The “blue moon” in fact appeared red as it came up through the hazy atmosphere, but as it rose higher in the sky, just as in the lyrics to the song, “Blue Moon,” the moon turned to gold, casting its golden glow across the waters.  As it rose, it seemed to grow even larger, rounder, brighter.

I imagined that people up and down the shore of this great lake were gathering to watch the super blue moon rise, and people all over the country, and perhaps the world, doing the same.  Whenever I found myself getting homesick during the time I lived in England, I’d look up at the moon and know that the same moon was shining on the people I loved back home.  The moon connects us all.  Indeed, now, a few days later, friends from all over are posting photos of this magnificent sight. Roxanne Ornelas, one of the Lake Superior Nibi walkers[ii] who have been circumnavigating the lake the entire month of August to honor it and pray for the its health, posted this: “Last night several of we water walkers went to the shore of Lake Superior for a full moon ceremony. We watched as the moon first appeared in the far-off distance as a glimmer on the water. We were all struck speechless and stood still in awe of the vision before us. We watched in silence as the moon slowly rose and spread Her glorious light onto the water.”[iii]

Her glorious light.  As poet Marge Piercy wrote, “The moon is always female.” The connection of women and the moon is strong.  As Robin Wall Kimmerer says in relating “The Words That Come Before Else,” “We put our minds together and give thanks to our oldest Grandmother, the Moon, who lights the nighttime sky.  She is the leader of women all over the world. . . . “ (Braiding Sweetgrass, 113).  In cultures around the world, the moon has been celebrated as grandmother, mother, goddess, and protector of women – the Greek Artemis, the Dinka Abuk, the Zulu iNyang, the Celtic Cerridwen, the Chinese Chang’e, the Aztec Coyolxauhqu, the Roman Luna, the Thracian Bendis, to name just a few. Women around the world celebrate the moon in full moon ceremonies and new moon ceremonies.  The stages of women’s lives – maiden, mother, and crone – have also been linked to the stages of the moon – waxing, full, and waning. The moon has long been associated with the female and femininity due to the strong correlation between the lunar cycles and women’s menstrual cycles – hence the common root, mensis, for our words for “month,” “moon,” and “menstruation,” the last known among the indigenous peoples of North America as “moon time.” Is this concurrence of women’s cycles and the moon’s cycles really just coincidence? It is a striking association – the pull of the moon on the waters of the world, on the wombs of women.  Is it any wonder women have long felt so connected to the moon? 

Which has made me ponder, do men feel the same connection to the moon? Do bi and trans folk? I have felt that connection so keenly, especially when my cycles and the moon’s were so in sync.  It feels much more a spiritual connection than a purely physical one.  I have made pacts with the moon, sought her wisdom, felt her blessing and her protection. 

It seems we all feel the enchantment of moonlight.  So many songs have been written in the moon’s honor.  My brother and his wife love to tell how they can fill a long car ride singing moon songs without repetition – “Moon River,” “Fly Me to the Moon,” “Moonlight Serenade,” “Moon Shadow,” “Harvest Moon,” “By the Light of the Silvery Moon,” “On Moonlight Bay,” “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” “Dancing in the Moonlight,” and of course, “Blue Moon.”

Kimmerer continues the prayer of gratitude, “By her changing face we measure time . . . ” (Braiding Sweetgrass, 114). Perhaps in ways of which we may be unaware, we orient ourselves to the waxing and waning crescent, quarter, half, gibbous, and full moon, checking the night skies and our calendars for the current and upcoming phases.  The Gregorian calendar, created in 1582 and now used as the standard measure of time throughout the world, is a solar calendar, based on the revolution of the earth around the sun.  But many ancient and indigenous cultures have instead used lunar calendars based on the cycles of the moon’s phases. Among the Anishinaabe, the indigenous peoples of the land on which I dwell, who base their calendar on the thirteen moons of a year, the blue moon would not exist. Instead, each moon is named for the phenological changes of that season -- the sugarbush moon, the strawberry moon, the falling leaves moon. What those of us who use the Gregorian calendar know as August is for the Anishinaabe Manoominii Giizhis, or ricing moon.  It is the time of harvesting manoomin, wild rice, the grain that is the center of the Anishinaabe story of migration – to travel to the place where the food grows on the water – and the heart of their cultural and spiritual traditions.

How different life on this planet would be without the moon -- its rhythms, its welcomed light on a winter’s night, its friendly face smiling down upon us when full and its crescent enchanting us when it has just begun or is soon to leave.  Moreover, without the moon’s gravitational pull, which keeps the earth’s axis at a steady 23.4 °, the earth would lose its balance. It would wobble, sometimes pointing straight up and down, eliminating the seasons, and sometimes lying on its side, making the poles extremely hot and the equator freezing cold.  Most of what we know of life on earth -- plants, animals, seasons, ocean tides, human existence -- would not have been possible without this bit of earth, split off from us billions of years ago, that we know as the moon.

On the night of the super blue moon we gathered in awe[iv] and in reverent gratitude for this celestial orb that reflects the sun back to us when the daylight has dimmed, governs our oceans and tides, inspires celebration and song, prevents us from gyrating wildly through our orbit around the sun, and ironically, keeps us grounded. What Roxanne Ornelas said of the Nibi walkers was true of all of us who were drawn that night to watch the moon rise -- “We were all struck speechless and stood still in awe.” The relation of the moon to us earthlings is awe-inspiring indeed.  Is it any wonder we are moon worshipers.

Sources

How does the Moon affect the Earth? | Institute of Physics (iop.org)

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

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

The Origin of the Moon (timeanddate.com)

[i] “Once In a Very Blue Moon,” Gene Levine and Pat Alger, first introduced by Nanci Griffith on her album Once In A Very Blue Moon,  1985.

[ii] The Nibi (Water) Walks, founded by Sharon Day, are Indigenous-led ceremonies to pray for the water. As they say, every step is in prayer and gratitude for water, our life-giving force. For more information visit www.nibiwalk.org. The Lake Superior Nibi Walk began in Cedar, Wisconsin on August 1st of this year. The walkers walked thirty to forty miles a day around the great lake, completing their walk on September 3rd.

[iii] (20+) Lake Superior Nibi Walk | Facebook

[iv] For more on our need for experiences of awe, see my blog post of April 20, 2023: Vastness — Beth Bartlett Duluth

Putting Food By

I spent the morning peeling and slicing the golden peaches that will bring a taste of summertime to winter meals.  The peaches are just the latest in the annual ritual of preserving the bounty of spring and summer that began in April with the maple syrup from our trees.  June’s rhubarb has been chopped and frozen for pies, made into sauce, and baked into breads. In July we picked wild blueberries now put by to be baked into pies and sprinkled over cereal throughout the winter months. Every other year the last weeks of August are spent making gallons of applesauce, but this is an off-year, so there’s more room in the freezer for the quarts of frozen peaches. These will soon be followed by pints of green and yellow beans to be cooked into winter soups and stews.  The chipmunks have eaten nearly all the zucchini this year, and have nibbled on every ripening tomato, so I’ve had to harvest the tomatoes before they ripen. The piano is adorned with a trayful of Romas, planted for the first time this year in hopes of making our own sauce and paste.  They’ll be next to be preserved if the indoor ripening works.

It’s that time of year -- time to “put food by.” “To ‘put by’ is an early nineteenth-century way of saying to ‘save something you don’t have to use now, against the time when you’ll need it.’ . . . applied to food it is prudence and involvement and a return to the old simplicities.”  So begins my copy of the food preservation bible, Putting Food By. I bought it, along with my copy of Diet for a Small Planet, when I was a young woman living in central Minnesota farm country and was deeply involved in the food co-op and whole foods movement.  Growing up in ‘50s suburbia, despite my mom seeking out the best of fresh vegetables from local farmers in the summer, the rest of the year I was raised on the new convenience foods -- Minute Rice, Campbell’s soup, Birdseye frozen broccoli and peas, Libby’s fruit cocktail, Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks, Bisquick pancake mix, Betty Crocker cake mixes, Jell-o, Wonder Bread, and for a real treat, Swanson’s TV dinners.  Now, wanting to “return to the old simplicities,” my pantry was filled with brown and wild rice, bulgar, barley, lentils, dried beans, chickpeas, soybeans, and whole wheat flour.  I wanted to be involved in growing and preserving my own food, so we grew corn, beans, beets, carrots, zucchini, cukes, and more in our garden and patronized local pick-your-own apple and berry farms.  And I was determined to learn how to put food by.  So with my copy of Putting Food By as my guide, and my new canning kettle, Ball canning jars, and paraffin, I set about to preserve the summer’s harvest. 

My first attempt was strawberry jam from the buckets of strawberries from the nearby pick-your-own farm.  Little did I know how much jam a few buckets of strawberries would make.  After the tenth hour and the fiftieth pint of jam, I was done in and nearly gave up on preserving for good.  But I’ve learned that’s how the days of putting food by are.  The years that our sauce tree bears, for two weeks I spend three to four hours every day cleaning, cooking, milling, and freezing pints and quarts of applesauce.  That sauce will delight friends and family and keep us well-fed for the next two years.  Preparing and freezing the peaches takes several intense hours over two to three days, but the sweet summery flavors reward us well into the winter.  Beans are relatively quick, requiring only a few hours of cleaning, cutting, blanching, and freezing.

Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle – her chronicling of her family’s year of eating only foods grown locally – inspired me years ago to eat as locally as possible.  This aspect of putting food by grows ever more important as we face the current climate crisis.  As Kingsolver’s husband, Steve Hopp, noted, we in the US consume about 400 gallons of oil a year per person, about 17% of our nation’s energy use, for agriculture.  Tractors, combines, harvesters, irrigation, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides all use oil and natural gas.  Even more fossil fuels are consumed in the trip from farm to table – on average 1500 miles.  Processing, packaging, and warehousing also use fossil fuels.  If everyone in the US ate just one meal a week of locally and organically raised meat and produce, we would reduce the nation’s fuel consumption by 1.1 million barrels (that’s over 46 million gallons) of oil every week (Kingsolver, Animal, 5). In my efforts to eat locally, I can’t get more local than the syrup from our maples, the applesauce from the tree outside my front door, and the tomatoes and beans in my garden. Every jar I re-use is one less can in the mining/transportation/waste/recycle stream. And the composted detritus of stems and leaves feed next year’s garden. 

I’ve come to love the whole process of planting, growing, harvesting, cutting, cooking, blanching, storing. I once dreamed of having a root cellar filled with carrots and onions and potatoes, shelves filled with canned goods, herbs hung from the ceiling to dry, sliced and dried fruits, but my vision has exceeded my grasp.  Over the years I’ve pitted and dried cherries, sliced and dried apples, managed to keep carrots, squash, and potatoes for a couple months in a cool garage, but mostly I’ve opted for a freezer full of fruits and veggies, breads and sauces. Limited as it is, it is still incredibly satisfying, as nourishing for the soul as for the palate.

As I put these fresh, sweet peaches in jars, in my head I’m listening to Greg Brown’s lyrics:

Peaches on the shelf

Potatoes in the bin

Supper’s ready, everybody come on in, now

Taste a little of the summer  . . .

Grandma’s put it all in jars. 

 Sources

Brown, Greg. 1983. “Canned Goods.” One Night.

Hertzberg, Ruth, Beatrice Vaughan, and Janet Greene. 1979. Putting Food By.  Second Ed.,  Revised and Enlarged. New York: Bantam.

Kingsolver, Barbara. 2007. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. With Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.

Lappé, Frances Moore. 1975. Diet for a Small Planet. New York: Ballantine Books.

Curiosity

Pandora

In my last post I mentioned the tale of Prometheus who stole fire from the gods.  Zeus punished Prometheus by condemning him to eternal torture, chained to a rock where an eagle would eat his liver every day, which then would grow back every night only to be eaten again the next day.  But this was not enough to avenge Prometheus’s deed.  In addition, Zeus punished the entire human race by sending the first woman, Pandora.  Pandora is a woman of “all gifts,” since all of the gods and goddesses in the Greek pantheon bestowed a gift upon her, one of which was curiosity.  It is curiosity that drives Pandora to open the jar she was forbidden to open, and in so doing unleashed all the evils and miseries onto the world.  Woman as punishment; woman as the bringer of evil and misery.  These themes have shaped the western view of women for millennia.

Eve

Similarly, the Judaeo-Christian story of Eve tells of how the first woman, but also curiosity, eats the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, bringing mortality and evil into the once idyllic Garden of Eden.  With Tertullian’s[i] condemnation of all women as Eve -- "Do you not know that you are Eve?  . . . You are the gateway of the devil,” and Augustine’s regard of Eve as the originator of sin, women would henceforth be regarded as the source of all evil in the world. 

Pandora

While women have suffered condemnation and secondary status based on these myths, it is women’s curiosity in particular against which we are warned.  Curiosity killed the cat after all. We see this theme repeated as well in the stories of Psyche and Bluebeard.  Psyche was the youngest of three daughters whose beauty was so great she scared off would-be suitors. The god Apollo directs her parents to dress her as a bride and leave her on a mountaintop to face “dire mischief.” Instead, she awakes in a palace where she is visited by her unknown husband, with whom she falls deeply in love.  Her paradisial life comes with one stipulation – that she meet her husband only in darkness and never attempt to look upon him.  However, at the urgings of her sisters, Psyche’s curiosity gets the better of her, and with the light of an oil lamp[ii], she looks upon the face of her love, who is awakened when a drop of oil from the lamp falls upon him.  Her husband it turns out is no monster, as her sisters imagined, but rather Eros. Thus ensues the wrath of Venus, Eros’s mother, who beats Psyche and sets her upon several tasks.  Though unlike Pandora and Eve, she is not responsible for the ills of humanity, and is eventually reunited with Eros, her inquisitiveness does cause her suffering.

Bluebeard

In the story of Bluebeard, the wealthy nobleman Bluebeard tells his young wife that while he is away she is free to explore any room in the castle, except the one opened by a tiny key.  Like Psyche, the wife’s sisters, who are very curious to see what lies behind that door, urge the wife to try the key. When they open the door, they find a room filled with the blood and corpses of Bluebeard’s previous wives, whose curiosity had gotten them killed.  When Bluebeard discovers that his wife has opened the door, he screams, “’Now it’s your turn, my lady.’”  In the end, the wife gathers the support of her sisters and brothers who kill Bluebeard, but the warning against curiosity is there nonetheless.

I’ve become curious about this caution against curiosity.  What is to be feared in women’s curiosity, who fears it, and why?   The answer seems obvious.  Those upholding the status quo -patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, militarism – are fearful of those who would render these suspect, because they want to maintain a system that profits them, that upholds their power and status.  “So many power structures – inside households, within institutions, in societies, in international affairs – are dependent on our continuing lack of curiosity,” (3) writes feminist theorist Cynthia Enloe.

When my son was about three, his persistent word was “why”?  He wanted to understand so many societal norms and puzzled over things that didn’t make sense – like why fire fighters were referred to as “firemen.”  Girls can be fire fighters, too, he reasoned. I wish I’d written down all of his questions. I was struck by how many of them made me wonder about things I’d just taken for the way things are. Like Psyche’s lamp, his questions were illuminating.

The way things are.  That phrase can justify and normalize so much that is simply privilege and power for some.  Enloe names several other phrases that dampen our curiosity – “natural,” “tradition,” “always.” It’s natural for women to take care of children. It’s tradition that the father gives away the bride.  The last, “always” is so often used to justify women’s secondary status – it’s just the way it’s always been, as if patriarchy didn’t have a beginning.  (And as feminist historian Gerda Lerner said, if patriarchy had a beginning, then it can have an end.) “With the passage of time, certain ideas. . . begin to seem as if they have always existed,” wrote Susan Griffin. “In this way they move outside the confines of doubt. . . . and give [them] the illusory sense of natural law” (204).[iii]

Similarly, our bodies can exhibit symptoms -- tension in the neck and shoulders, a twitch of the eye, an ache in the lower back, a continual nausea -- that over time we come to regard as “normal.” In Somatic Experiencing® and Indigenous Focusing-Oriented trauma therapy, we are trained to approach these body clues with curiosity.  Befriend them; ask them questions -- why are they there? what do they need to say? are the familiar? are they all yours? With sincere inquisitiveness and loving attention, the body slowly releases the trapped energies, often revealing aspects of our lives that have long been hidden, but that are important for us to know.   Likewise, we need to approach the aches and disquietudes of our body politic with curiosity in order to reveal the things that are important for us to know in order to act to change them.[iv]

In the tales of Psyche and Bluebeard, it is the women’s sisters who fan the flames of curiosity, and in the case of Eve, it is the serpent goddess.  While some may interpret this as women undermining other women – at least that is the implication in the ways some of the tales are written – I regard it as the gift of sisterhood -- women encouraging women to ask questions, to wonder, to seek forbidden knowledge, to question authority, to upend the patriarchy. As Christine Downing wrote of Psyche’s sisters, “they are precisely the sisters able to push her in the way her soul requires” (47).

This was the power of consciousness-raising groups which consisted of asking questions, and answering them honestly from one’s experience, without judgment or critique from others or oneself.  Commenting on Bluebeard, Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote the forbidden key is the one that would awaken consciousness, and that “to forbid a woman to use the key to consciousness strips away Wild Woman, her natural instinct for curiosity and her discovery of ‘what lies underneath” (51).  She continues that trivializing women’s curiosity “denies women’s insight, hunches, intuitions . . . . It attempts to attack her fundamental power” (52). Consciousness-raising groups, on the other hand, encouraged this curiosity, this uncovering of truths, validated women’s intuitions and knowings, and empowered women to act to change their lives and the world.

In this time of the erosion of women’s rights, environmental protections, gay rights, affirmative action, and the grip of the radical right in Congress and the courts, it is easy to fall into cynicism. However, as Enloe warns, “cynicism dulls curiosity” (18).  Curiosity is what we most need at this time – to be sure that those choices of a few don’t, in Griffin’s words, “fade into the background of normalcy”( 204).  Rather we need to continue to ask questions, approaching every impingement on the body politic with the curiosity that keeps the possibility of hope alive.

After Pandora has unleashed all the miseries into the world, and puts the lid back on the jar, the only thing left in her jar is hope. The hopes of the world rest on the gift of curiosity that the Pandoras of the world, the curious feminists, have to give.

 

Sources

Downing, Christine. 1990. Psyche’s Sisters: ReImagining the Meaning of Sisterhood. New York: Continuum.

Enloe, Cynthia. 2004. The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Estes, Clarissa Pinkola. 1992. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype.  New York: Ballantine Books.

Griffin, Susan. 1992. A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War. New York: Anchor Books.

Hamilton, Edith. 1942. Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. New York: New American Library.

Lerner, Gerda. 1986. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press.

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

______. 2022. The Quaking of America: An Embodied Guide to Navigating Our Nation’s Upheaval and Racial Reckoning. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press.

Norris, Pamela. 1998. Eve: A Biography. New York: New York University Press.

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

 [i] Tertullian (c. 155 – c. 220) was a Christian theologian who is often considered the founder of Western theology.

[ii] That lamp is now the symbol of knowledge and education.

[iii]In her masterpiece, A Chorus of Stones, Griffin shows how the strategies, tactics, and armaments of war indeed the very existence of war and militarism, have rested on the choices of just one or a few individuals, who might have chosen differently.  War is not “inevitable” or “natural,” or “just the way things are, but rather the result of individual choices that can be questioned and changed.

[iv] Our awareness of dis-ease in the body politic may first appear in our physical bodies. Resmaa Menakem provides an excellent analysis of the ways in which the politics of racism in this country surface in our physical bodies. Similar analyses can be made of the ways patriarchy, heterosexism, capitalism, and so on manifest in our bodies. 

Fire

Fire. The workings, the nature, the qualities, the meaning of fire has been appearing in several disparate aspects of my life of late – in the element of fire in the Celtic spring rituals; in books I’ve been reading – Raynor Winn’s Landlines where she finds the peatlands of Scotland scorched and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing where fire is both threatening and freeing; in the fireflies of summer nights and the firecrackers and fireworks of the 4th of July; even as a clue in a game my family was playing; and most ubiquitous of all – the smoke from distant Canadian wildfires. So persistent and ubiquitous a theme begs pondering.  It first appeared in the Rewilding course I’ve been taking this year, as the sacred element of spring in the Celtic wheel of the year.  That surprised me.  I associate summer, not spring, with fire. But in the Celtic wheel spring is the time of new beginnings, of the sunrise – the element of fire in the sacred direction of east, of the fires of passion and creativity, and the fires of the celebration of Beltane – May Day, as well as fire associated with the Christian commemoration of Pentecost forty days after Easter.

As I was studying the meanings of fire, fires burning in Canada were smothering the Northeast of the US in smoke, with New York City registering as having the most polluted air of any city on earth.  As the smoke reached as far south as Washington, D.C., it seemed that for the first time, people in seats of power in the market, the media, and government thought more seriously about climate change.  Ecotheologian Mary DeJong asks, what happens when there is too much fire?  We are seeing this now. As the earth heats up, fire it seems will become a persistent aspect of spring and summer in the north where it hadn’t rained for weeks. 

I’ve thought often of something Janine Benyus wrote in her book, Biomimicry: “For my money, the discovery of fire, as ballyhooed as it was, was vastly overrated. Fire was fine for a while – it kept us warm and cooked our meat.  The problem is, we’ve never gone beyond fire.  . .  . It hasn’t brought us one inch closer to living sustainably. Instead, torching old fuels has led to rising carbon dioxide levels; calving Antarctica icebergs, swelling ocean levels, and the hottest decade on record” (61). Surely we need to find other ways to power our lives that do not involve fire, or we shall burn ourselves into oblivion.

DeJong recalls the story of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to give to humanity, and for his crime was condemned to eternal torture – bound to a rock where an eagle would daily consume his liver which would grow back each night.  She says that his act ignited the spark of human autonomy, the deepest longing of humans – to seek the divine spark, to attempt to become divine.  At the end of The Rebel, Albert Camus’s reckoning with the forces that ignited Nazism, Stalinism, and totalitarianism, Camus wrote of “the men of Europe,” “ . . . they deified themselves and their misfortunes began; these gods have had their eyes put out” (305). It seems we have done that with fire – with the burning of ancient plant life – fossil fuels, assuming ourselves gods, as if we could keep burning without thought, without consequence, or without care of the consequences when the gods of profit burn brighter than care for each other and the earth; living in the delusion and the folly of assuming that fire is within our control.  But as DeJong notes, fire has a life of its own. It defies boundaries and will consume everything in its path.  And so with presumption of divinity, our misfortunes began — our eyes put out, acting as though we ourselves are fire, blindly consuming and destroying everything in our path. 

But this, as De Jong notes, is just the shadow side of fire.  Fire can also be inviting, welcoming, warming.  It is the hearth – the centerpiece of home.  In the game we were playing, “Wavelength,” “fire in a fireplace” was the clue given for something midway between ordinary and extraordinary, tending a bit more toward extraordinary.  We debated the ordinariness and extraordinariness of fire for some time, for it is a bit of both. In the way we humans light fires for cooking, warmth, and ambience, fire contained within a fireplace is quite an ordinary thing; but fire is also quite extraordinary in the dance of the flames, in the way it transforms the energy contained in the wood into heat and light, in the way it can mesmerize. I think of all the times of sitting around campfires, singing, telling stories, all of us sharing in the glow and warmth.  The fire brings us together, gives us a feeling of protection, of harmony, of communion.  We no longer feel alone. Just a single candle lit in the dark can produce the same effect.  Fire is quite extraordinary in this regard.

When the hearings about the proposed construction of Line 3 in Minnesota began, one of my tasks was regularly to bring wood, food, and supplies to the woman keeping the sacred fire going.  The sacred fire -- fire as prayer, as ceremony to prevent the construction of the pipelines that would bring more fossil fuels to be burned from the tar sands of Alberta to the oil refineries in Superior, Wisconsin. Fire as profit for the destruction of the earth; fire as prayer for protection of the earth.

Among the Anishinaabe, the indigenous peoples on whose land I dwell, this is the time of the Seventh Fire. During this time, the light-skinned race will need to choose between two paths. The one path is green and lush; the other black and charred. If we choose the right path, the Seventh Fire will light the Eighth and final fire of peace, love, and harmony.  What path will we choose?  Will we heed Camus’s wisdom when he wrote, “The only original rule of life today: to learn to live and to die, and, in order to be a man [sic], to refuse to be a god. . . . the earth remains our first and our last love.  . . . It is time to forsake our age and its adolescent furies” (306). Will we mature in time? 

As the fires continue to rage across North America, I hear commentators say that we must learn to adapt to this being the new normal – develop indoor air purifying systems, learn to live indoors -- as if the only beings affected by these fires are wealthy humans who live off plastic food, filtered water, and purified air.  Rather, it seems the lesson of the fires is that if we are to adapt it will need to be to living without fossil fuels, to consuming less, to living simply so that all may live.

During our recent brief time away with our son, his wife, and 3-month-old son in the northern woodlands of Michigan, our days were punctuated by times we were forced inside due to the thickness of the smoke from the Canadian wildfires. The day after the smoke cleared and we were once again able to go outside, as the sun came out and shone on the clear waters, I rocked my grandson in the old hammock by the lake, singing the lines from John Denver’s “Sunshine On My Shoulders” – “If I had a day that I could give you, I’d give to you, a day just like today.” I was teary thinking of his future if we continue on this way. May we learn the lesson of fire and choose the right path -- to live so that every day of the years ahead may be a day with air as clear as that day.

 

Sources

Benyus, Janine M. 1997. Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature.  New York: William Morrow.

Camus, Albert. 1956. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt.  With a foreword by Sir Herbert Read. Trans. Anthony Bower. New York: Vintage.

DeJong, Mary. “Wild Spring: Your Seasonal Journey.” Rewilding. Waymarkers.

Gyasi, Yaa. 2016. Homegoing. New York: Vintage.

Winn, Raynor. 2022.  Landlines. UK: Penguin Michael Joseph. 

Emergence

It is the season of emergence.  As I write this, the first dragonflies are appearing, emerging from their crusty nymph shells, eyes bulging, wings unfurling, catching the breeze, and rising up into the air.  They are not the only insects emerging – the mosquitoes and midges have come before, preparing a feast for them – but they are among the loveliest.  Watching the slow process of the dragonfly emerge and wait for its wings to dry and take flight is truly miraculous, and one I never tire of should I happen to be blessed with observing it. Moths and butterflies are also emerging from their cocoons and coming into flight.  As are baby birds breaking out of their shells and after frenzied feeding also rise up into the air. 

Since I walk the same trail nearly every day, I am keenly aware of new forest life as it emerges, seemingly from nowhere – the ferns, the grasses, the spring green tips of evergreens, but particularly each different flower, whether a flowering bush or the wildflowers that adorn the forest floor.  They astonish and delight. It seems every day a different one appears.  Their lives are evanescent, usually blooming no longer than a week, maybe two, before beginning their task of creating fruit and seeds for the next generation. But in that brief span of time, they call me to attention, to presence, to gratitude for their loveliness. 

The first to appear are the merry marsh marigolds – bright yellow harbingers of spring, they beckon us to emerge from our winter caves to frolic in the woods. One cannot look upon them and not smile in absolute delight.

Bloodroot, often still wrapped in their winter coats, are next to blossom.

Soon after, the yellow violets, who are eventually joined by their purple cousins. Robin Wall Kimmerer wonders why the world is so beautiful when she sees goldenrod and asters together.  I think the same of the yellow and purple violets.  If one is lucky, one can find the mostly hidden chameleon Jack-in-the-Pulpit beside the violets as well. 

Another rare treat – Dutchman’s breeches.  I’d been wanting to find them ever since my mother bought a sweet little book by Ellen Fenlon, Signs of the Fairies, with close-up photos of flowers and fern fronds, each captioned with how they were signs of fairies.  The caption for Dutchman’s breeches was “Look!” said Stephen. “Pants on a clothesline.”  Finally, a few years ago I excitedly discovered them on my favorite stretch of wildflower viewing on the Superior Hiking Trail. 

I was blessed on my birthday this year to come upon an entire grove of serviceberry bushes. Though I had walked right by many every spring, I had never heard of them until recently when I came across a piece by Robin Wall Kimmerer, in of all things, Emergence Magazine, called “The Service Berry.” “The tree is beloved for its fruits, for medicinal use, and for the early froth of flowers that whiten woodland edges at the first hint of spring,” she writes. Encircled in that white ‘froth,” my encounter with them was magical. It seemed that the fairies had come ahead of me and decorated the woods for my birthday.  I was enchanted. Kimmerer goes on in her piece to talk of how service berries inspire gratitude, and indeed they did in me, for my response was to say the Potawatomi Prayer of Thanksgiving – “the words that come before all else.” The Potawatomi name for service berries is Bozakmin.  In Anishinaabemowen, to which Potawatomi is related, min or mino means “good,” and while this applies to the berries that will ripen this summer, the flowers that morning brought goodness to my day.

Now that it has begun to warm up, it seems new flowers emerge every day.   Wild strawberries, bluebells, clintonia, wood anemones, wintercress, dame’s violet, blue vetch, buttercups, baneberry, and dandelions and forget-me-nots galore. 

In June, great arrays of trillium adorn the forest floor, while their shyer cousins – the nodding trilliums – invite us to look more closely.

Pink and yellow ladyslippers will soon follow.

Yesterday, I was delighted to discover bunchberry blooming, my favorite probably because it bears the flower of my favorite trees, dogwoods.

The flowering bushes are preparing their feasts for birds – with the floral beginnings of black currants, chokecherries, honeysuckle, and red twig dogwood.  They are all a feast for the eyes.

Today on a different trail, new surprises – Canada mayflower -- also known as false lily of the valley, orange and yellow hawkweed, columbine, and glorious blue and pink lupine.

Finding the right essay title can sometimes be a challenge, but this -- “Emergence” -- presented itself as an inspiration from the flowers long before I ever began writing.  As I explored the word “emergence,” I discovered that both philosophers and physicists use the term to discuss the nature of causation and formation of things ranging from snowflakes to termite colonies to the murmurations of starlings to galaxies in the universe. I intended nothing so grandiose, or maybe more so, since for me it represents the rising of the life force itself – all that wants so much to come into being, to blossom.  As a gardener, in the past several weeks I’ve observed this in the flowers and vegetable seeds I’ve planted.  It is always such a thrill to see the first tender shoots come up through the dirt in search of light, of growth.  Perhaps nothing captures this so much as the beans that are just now beginning to emerge from the soil, bending and straining, eager for life.

All of us keen for life do this – from our first emergence from the womb to our eagerness to learn to talk and walk and make music and dance, to venturing from the safety and security of family to the wider world of friends and school and play, to discovering our unique gifts and being in the world.  It has been a great gladness in my life to witness my students as they emerged from shells of insecurities to confidence, from repressive ideologies to freeing new perspectives and self-recognition, from confusion to clarity, from unknowing to a grounded sense of self.  Or perhaps I’m seeing myself in them, for that was my own journey.

As I look for the significance in what is catching my attention at this moment, I wonder what is emerging in myself.  What new thoughts, perspectives, possibilities?  What longs to come to light?  This blog began by honoring the long-held desire in me to write essays -- freed from requirements of academia to write scholarly, documented books and articles to let my thoughts and ponderings meander on the page in something more formal than a journal entry but less rigid than an article or book chapter.  Actually, each post reflects something emerging in me, some question that begs exploring, some idea that seeks expression, some sorrow or great joy or simple delight that longs to be shared.  I’m grateful to all who take the time to read, and especially to those who send me their reflections in response.  And so I leave you with the question, what is emerging in you?

 Sources

Fenlon, Ellen. 1962. Signs of the Fairies. Akron, Ohio: The Sallfield Publishing Company.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall.  2013. Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolis: Milkweed Press.

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

 

Bibliophilia

I was lucky enough to be raised in a house filled with books.  In fact, one of the rooms in our house was called “the library.”  My parents’ bookshelves were filled primarily with religious texts by Biblical scholars; the living room with books on history and volumes of American Heritage;  my brother’s bookshelves housed Compton’s Encyclopedia which I poured over time and time again; but the library was an eclectic mix of biographies, literature, books on raising children, books on nature and gardening, my father’s medical books that I loved perusing – especially Gray’s Anatomy with the layered transparencies of the human body, and My Book House books – books filled with children’s classics – from nursery rhymes to “Peter Rabbit” to “Rose White and Rose Red” to childhood biographies of authors (all of them white, most of them male.)  My mother loved Tasha Tudor, and I developed a love for her illustrations as well – from her illustrated book of poetry to The Secret Garden to my favorite Christmas book --  A Doll’s Christmas.  Unlike other girls at the time, I didn’t grow up on Nancy Drew or Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Instead, my mom fed me with the “the little orange books” – childhood biographies of famous people -- Abe Lincoln, Jane Addams, and Clara Barton – that I read over and over again; a book of “heroines”-- including Harriet Tubman who inspired my first sermon at the age of ten; and a book on goddesses, where I first encountered the feminine divine in stories of Venus/ Aphrodite, Ceres/Demeter, and my favorite then and now – Diana/Artemis.  My very favorite childhood books were The Witch of Blackbird Pond and The Diary of Anne Frank. Thus, it comes as no surprise that in my adulthood among the many books on my bookshelves are biographies and autobiographies of women and books on feminist spirituality and goddesses and political, racial, and feminist thought.

Books have in many ways been my best friends – friends who have put into words the truths of my body and soul, friends who have informed, inspired, challenged, enlightened, delighted, torn me open, gutted me, kept me the best of company, and helped me to understand myself and the world. Is it any wonder then that my whole body reacts in horror at the wave of book bannings happening in schools and libraries across this country.  Many of the banned books were required reading in my high school -- George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm; William Golding’s Lord of the Flies; John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Richard Wright’s Native Son and yes, The Diary of Anne Frank.  Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 was required of all first-year-students when I started college. Many are books I’ve required students to read -- 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and the works of Audre Lorde and bell hooks.  I imagine nearly all the books I’ve had students read over the years would be banned if they were popular enough to come to certain officials’ attention, since most of the books currently being banned explore LGBTQ, racist, and sexist oppression; racial justice; and feminist topics. Many are books that have most enlightened me -- Nikole Hannah-Jones’ The 1619 Project, Zora Neale Houston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Beloved, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Malcolm X’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning (which should be required reading of everyone in this country.)

It's certainly not the first time books have been banned, burned, or otherwise destroyed. Most have been for religious reasons – destroying books considered to be “heretical,” at odds with the ruling faith. The Bible itself as we know it today was created through a process of a winnowing out of the controversial books down to 66 books. We have some idea, but mostly don’t know exactly what was discarded, but in 1945, Muhammed ‘Ali al-Sammãn discovered an earthenware jar in a cave near the town of Nag Hammadi in Egypt containing thirteen bound papyrus books. In all, fifty-two writings were discovered at Nag Hammadi. Now known as the Gnostic Gospels, these were some of the texts condemned as heresy by orthodox Christians in the mid–second century. Among other things, they raise controversies about Jesus’s resurrection, the role of Mary Magdalene, Sophia and God as mother, and self-knowledge as knowledge of God.  One wonders who buried them and what knowledge they hoped to keep alive in the event of their discovery. What other scrolls might have been buried? What truths have been burned and discarded?  How might have Christianity and its role throughout the world been different had these not been hidden?[i]

Nazi students burning books in 1933

Probably the most infamous of book burnings are those of Nazis in Germany in the 1930s.  Among the first books burned were those akin to those being banned in the US today -- books on homosexuality, intersexuality, and transgender – when the Institute of Sexology was burned to the ground. This was closely followed by burning books by Jewish and leftist authors – from Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud to Ernest Hemmingway and Helen Keller. Thus does totalitarianism begin with the destruction of competing ideas, with destruction of the truth. 

But that was Nazi Germany.  It couldn’t happen in America, right?  I recently saw a post on Facebook quoting the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression which said that banning books is unAmerican, but unfortunately, it’s quite American. Just as books in the US critical of systemic racism are being banned now, books critical of slavery were banned in the South with the rise of abolitionism, with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin topping the list. In the 1870s, the Comstock Society’s desire to rid the nation of “lewdness” led to massive book burnings, and the Comstock Law[ii] has led to a variety of books being banned over the decades. Its legacy is alive and well in the banning of so many books in the US today -- from Gender Queer to All Boys Aren’t Blue to Sold -- on the basis of depictions of sexuality.

 But resistance to book banning is also American.  In Arkansas, the Central Arkansas Library System, and a coalition of other libraries, are protesting the law recently signed into law by Gov. Sara Sanders, that makes it possible to imprison librarians for giving materials deemed inappropriate for minors to children, arguing that it violates the First Amendment. In Illinois, the legislature has passed a bill that blocks community and public-school libraries in the state from receiving certain types of funding if they ban books, in effect imposing a monetary penalty on institutions that go along with book banning. During the month of May, the New York Public library, through an initiative called Books for All, made commonly banned books available to all readers aged 13 and up, whether or not they had a library card.

I hadn’t intended this to be a post about book banning.  I had intended to share more in depth about many of the books I have loved, and undoubtedly this post needs a Part Two, if not Parts Three and Four. But I trust the process of writing to reveal what needs articulation. I also came to realize that much of this blog is already about sharing the books which have so informed my life, raised my curiosity, enriched my life.

However, something I read in Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Walking disquieted me. He writes, “Our first question about the value of a book . . . is can [it] walk? Books by authors imprisoned in their studies . . . are heavy and indigestible. They are born of a compilation of other books on the table [often piled high on the table in front of me as I compose these posts.] They are like fattened geese: crammed with citations, stuffed with references, weighed down with annotations. . . . Books made from other books, by comparing lines with other lines, by repeating what others have said [as I am doing here] . . . remain on the level of recopying” (19-20). But, he continues, books that arise from “an author who composes while walking  . . . are light and profound” (20). 

I have written books like the former (academia will do that to you), and books like the latter, just as I’ve written posts like the former, and posts like the latter.  This blog began as a way to share ideas and insights, primarily from the books that have moved me, and their conversation with each other. I’ve always found the interweaving of books and ideas to result in a synthesis that reveals novel and often exciting perspectives -- hopefully something that is other than simply “recopying.”  I share citations in part so that others may seek out the source and draw their own conclusions.  The actual writing in my mind often takes place while walking, so perhaps occasionally the compendium of ideas rises above “heavy and indigestible.”

I am grateful to the books and authors that have walked with me through this life, to the many who have placed just the right book in my hands at just the right time, and to all who share this love of books – bibliophilia (even though MS Word doesn’t recognize it as a word!) – with me. 

 [i] In her conclusion, Pagels suggests that had Christianity retained its multiple forms, it may have taken a very different role in the world, and may even not have survived at all.  She posits that it is fortunate that the scrolls were found in the 20th century, arguing that had they been found 1000 years earlier, they most likely would have been burned for heresy.  She said that in the 20th century, we have a new perspective that enables us to appreciate them as a “powerful alternative to the orthodox Christian tradition” (151).  Today, I wonder what might have become of them had they been found in this 21st century when books are once again under scrutiny for being heretical to the chosen faith of some.

[ii] The Comstock Law of 1873 made illegal the selling or sending of anything considered “obscene,” including information on contraception and abortion.

Durga Rising: Feminism as Fierce Compassion

In a post for the “Feminism and Religion” blog earlier this year,[i] “Why Feminism Needs the Fierce Goddesses,” Susan Foster argues that a “flagging” feminist movement needs the revitalizing energy of the “fierce goddesses” of ancient times to challenge the patriarchal forces that seem to be on the rise as increasingly we find women’s lives and freedoms constrained. She writes, “the dark goddesses of ancient times have been submerged in our psyches, but they serve as a repository of fierce energy, of female rage against injustice.”  She continues, “It’s important and healthy for us as women to reclaim our anger, using it to protect ourselves and fight for our rights in systems that are oppressive.”

Reading this, I immediately thought of Beverly Wildung Harrison’s piece, “The Power of Anger in the Work of Love,” and China Galland’s, The Bond Between Women: A Journey to Fierce Compassion. Anger in the work of love; fierce compassion.  In this time of mass shootings, insurrection, the ongoing assault on women, LGBTQ, and BIPOC peoples, when rage seems so easily fueled by hate, envy, and greed, it is the rage based in love and compassion that is most needed.  It is the rage of the fierce dark goddesses who are moved to act against injustice. It is the rage of the feminism I love. With its source in love and compassion, it is a rage that rebels in the best sense of the word – that at once refuses injustice and affirms dignity and respect, that speaks truth to power, that is grounded in solidarity and friendship, and values the immanence of the earth, the water, the body, and the divine spark in all beings.[ii]  As bell hooks wrote of her work in feminist and social justice movements, “It was always love that created the motivation for profound inner and outer transformation. Love was the force that empowered folks to resist domination and create new ways of living and being in the world” (Writing, 194-195).

Writing about the power of anger in the work of this love, Harrison argued, “Anger signals something amiss in relationship . . . that change is called for.  . . . Anger denied subverts community. Anger expressed directly is a mode of taking the other seriously, of caring” (220). We can call upon this anger not to destroy, but to create.  “We [women] have been the chief builders of whatever human dignity and community has come to expression” (217).

Hindu goddess Durga

This anger based in love is the fierceness born of compassion.  In her pilgrimage “to find the waters of fierce compassion,” China Galland sought out the faith, spiritual practices, and actions of women engaged in the work of saving the world they love. She began with the mother of fierce goddesses – Durga –celebrated as the great goddess who rose up out of flames in order to defeat Mahisasura, the demon who was intent on destroying the world. Every time she and her female warriors defeated him and his warriors, he rose up again in different forms, until Sumbha, the Lord of the Demons, sought her out.  Ultimately, Durga defeated even Sumbha, and once again the rivers flowed, the trees blossomed, and song and dance returned to the earth. The people begged Durga to stay and rule the earth, but she wanted none of the praise or the power.  She withdrew, only promising to return if ever the earth was in danger of being destroyed again.

Galland regards the demons as symbols of the most serious of human failings – hatred, greed, jealousy, cruelty, enemy-making. The centerpiece of the prophecy that foretold of the time of destruction by these demons was that only a woman could save them. Symbolically, the woman, the female/feminine represents compassion, as the one who “suffers with” – the one who tends those who suffer with care and understanding.  But Galland went to explore a different aspect of compassion – its fierceness. As Sister Chân Không, the Vietnamese Buddhist nun who taught with Thich Nhat Hanh, reminded Galland, the statues of Tara, the bodhisattva of compassion, in Vietnam appear in both her fierce and her kind forms, “’because out of compassion, sometimes you have to be very fierce’” (271). Galland’s journey took her to India and Latin America, to witness fierce compassion at work in the efforts of Aruna Uprety aiding women and girls who had been sold into prostitution at ages as young as six, in the weekly vigils on behalf of their missing children of the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina, in the work of Yvonne Bezerra de Mello feeding and caring for the street children of Rio de Janeiro, and more. 

As I’ve pondered where we witness this fierce compassion at work in the world today, my first thought was of Patrisse Khan-Cullors, who from early childhood had watched the older brother she dearly loved be harassed and beaten by police, thrown into juvie again and again, and had his life destroyed by the resultant mental illness that left him in tortured conditions in prison for many years; who had watched so many of the lives of black women and men in her life be similarly destroyed.  So that when the white man who shot and killed “unarmed Trayvon Martin, sixteen and skinny, carrying iced tea and candy . . . walking home to his own house (Khan-Cullors, 189) was acquitted of all charges, in her outrage fueled by deep love, she and two friends formed Black Lives Matter, and later, Say Her Name. “In every demand . . . I see the faces of my mothers and my brothers, my father and my sister,” writes Kahn-Cullers. “We are firm in our conviction that our lives matter by virtue of our birth” (203-204).

I think of Jen Cousins, leading the fight against book banning in Florida schools.[iii] She was moved to act out of fierce love for her non-binary child and others like them, so that in books like Gender Queer [iv]  “they could find acceptance and confirmation and know they were not alone,”[v] and so that all children might grow up in an atmosphere of love and understanding, rather than hate and fear.

And I think of the Water Protectors, who have been protesting against the destruction of the living waters in aquifers, rivers, pristine wild rice lakes, the Great Lakes, and great oceans out of a deep love – the women of Standing Rock; the indigenous women who led the struggle against Line 3 in Minnesota and continue that struggle against Line 5; the Grandmothers Gathering for Gitchigaaming; Josephine Mandamin and the water walkers who have followed in her footsteps.[vi] As Robin Wall Kimmerer and Kathleen Deane Moore wrote of the women of Standing Rock, “The land is sacred, a living breathing entity, for whom we must care, as she cares for us. And so it is possible to love land and water so fiercely you will live in a tent in a North Dakota winter to protect them.” Love so fiercely you will sit in prayer and ceremony occupying sacred ground as it is being dug up to install oil pipelines.  Love so fiercely you will risk arrest.  Love so fiercely that you will dedicate your life to walking and praying by the waters. 

In these efforts of fierce compassion led by women, Durga rises again.

 Sources

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

Fleischmann, Jeff. “Two Moms Are at the Center of Book Banning in America: ‘It’s Exhausting’.” Los Angeles Times, May 15, 2023.

 Foster, Susan. “Why Feminism Needs the Fierce Goddesses.” https://feminismandreligion.com. January 26, 2023.

 Galland, China.  1998.The Bond Between Women: A Journey to Fierce Compassion. New York: Riverhead Books.

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

hooks, bell. 2013. Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge.

Khan-Cullors, Patrisse & Asha Bandele. 2017. When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir. New York: St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall and Kathleen Deane Moore, “The White Horse and the Humvees.” Yes! Magazine. 11/05/16.

 Meet Josephine Mandamin (Anishinaabekwe), The “Water Walker” – Indigenous Rising

 The Women of Standing Rock – WOW (wowblog.me)

 

[i] Why Feminism Needs the Fierce Goddesses by Susan Foster (feminismandreligion.com)

[ii] See my Rebellious Feminism: Camus’s Ethic of Rebellion and Feminist Thought.

[iii] Jen Cousins is one of the co-founders of the Florida Freedom to Read project.

[iv] Gender Queer is the most banned book in America.

[v] Fleischmann, Jeff. “Two Moms Are at the Center of Book Banning in America: ‘It’s Exhausting’.” Los Angeles Times, May 15, 2023.

[vi] The Standing Rock encampment began on April 1, 2017, when a few women from the Standing Rock tribe formed a prayer circle, praying that their land not be invaded by the “black snake” of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Among them are LaDonna Brave Bull Allard and Phyllis Young are among the leaders of the movement.  Krystal Two Bulls, now the Executive Director of Honor the Earth, began the NO DAPL global movement. The Women of Standing Rock – WOW (wowblog.me) Native women water protectors, among them Winona LaDuke of Honor the Earth and Tara Houska of the Giniw Collective, were at the center of the struggle against Line 3 in northern Minnesota and continue their efforts against Line 5 that crosses Wisconsin, the UP of Michigan, and the Straits of Mackinac. The Grandmothers Gathering brought indigenous grandmothers and women from across the US to Madeline Island in Lake Superior for four days to bless, pray, and sing, share their gratitude for, and give loving attention to the water. Grandmothers Gathering for Gitchigaaming (Lake Superior)  - Home. Josephine Mandamin, a member of the Wikwemikong First Nation, began the water walker movement, walking around Lake Superior in 2003, and eventually all of the Great Lakes, carrying a pail of water to bring awareness to the need to protect the water. In Anishinaabe culture, women are the protectors of the water. “As women, we are carriers of the water. We carry life for the people,” said Mandamin. Mandamin died in 2019, but others continue to walk for the water. The Nibi Walk around Lake Superior, led by water walker Sharon Day, will begin on August 1 in Duluth, Minnesota, and they invite any and all to join them.  Meet Josephine Mandamin (Anishinaabekwe), The “Water Walker” – Indigenous Rising

 

Walking

This post begins with a caveat. The theme by its very definition excludes those who for one reason or another – injury, paralysis, degenerative nerve or muscle disease, stroke, congenital conditions, the infirmities of elderhood, the pre-amble of infancy – have never, have yet, or are no longer able to walk.  I have been among you at various points in my life.  I have also walked with dear ones who move through the world in wheelchairs, and have been on lovely walks when I’ve been the one in a wheelchair.  Walking, while ubiquitous, is not a universal experience, but I hope all will find some aspects of this piece that speak to them.

December 5th, 1972 – a date I intended to commemorate every year.  On that day fifty-one years ago, I was allowed to walk the half a block to the end of our street and back – the first time in three months I was permitted to walk any farther than from my bed to my wheelchair. Prescribed complete bedrest at the age of twenty to reduce the inflammation in my heart, that first walk was exhilarating.  I vowed never to go a day without immense appreciation for the ability to walk.  And yet I have.  For the most, I take walking for granted.  On the days when the wind is whipping ice crystals or drenching rain or freezing cold, I can dread having to go out and walk my dog, or just walk from my car into a building.  I’ve had potent reminders of the privilege of walking – the short-lived TIA that left me paralyzed for a few hours; the “triple threat” knee injury[i] that made just getting from the bedroom to the bathroom a challenge; the four years of waiting for a transplant when walking more than a few hundred feet might elevate my heart rate to dangerous levels – but mostly, I rarely give the ability to walk a second thought.  So, though many before me have written whole tomes on the subject,[ii] I wanted to take a moment to reflect on this activity that gives shape to my days, my friendships, my thoughts, my perspective on the world.

The English language has many words for walking, each distinguished by speed, terrain, length, steadiness, purpose.  “Amble” seems without purpose, as do “wander” and “roam”-- though of greater length; whereas “stride” seems determined.  “Stroll” invokes leisure and “promenade” formality. “Tramping,” “tromping,” and “stomping” signify walking that is heavy and loud; in other situations we need “tread” lightly or “tiptoe” around. “Pace” connotes anxiety, and “saunter” its opposite – relaxed, easy, contemplative walking, from the medieval pilgrims who traveled to the Holy Lands -- sainte terre-ers. Hiking is in a category by itself, requiring being out in nature, elevation, exertion, and good boots.[iii] So, while many of my walks include elements of all of these, the all-purpose word “walk” most suits my intent.

The nature of a walk is often determined by its pace. Mindful and contemplative walking require a slower speed.  A good, brisk walk provides a sense of agency and empowerment, or simply a great way to blow off steam.  In companionable walking, we tend to adjust our gaits to each other.  Both once fast walkers, my sister-in-law and I were excellent walking companions, reveling in covering the length of London in a few hours.  My dissertation advisor was a lanky 6’7”, and on our frequent walks across the Washington Avenue bridge on the U of M campus, I would find myself speeding up faster and faster to match his pace only to discover that he was constantly speeding up so he could match mine! I have friends who walk more quickly than I, others who need a slower pace, and those whose movement matches mine.  We all seem to find ways to meet each other.

Walks vary as well by the surface one trods. Concrete and asphalt are not kind to me, often resulting in shin splints.  Walking on new-fallen snow can be enchanting; ice challenging. I love best to walk on dirt paths and forest floors, especially the forgiving sponginess of a cedar forest, though I’m also drawn to the magnetism of ancient rocks. Walking barefoot on a hard-packed sand beach is perhaps the best of all. 

I was lucky to be able to walk to most places I wanted to go as a child.  I walked to school, church, my friends’ homes, the lake where we swam in the summer, and the hill where we sledded in the winter. We usually rode our bikes to the “junction” – the drugstore where we got candy and comic books – but sometimes walked there as well.  The sidewalk to and from school provided its own entertainment – needing to jump over the slabs with crosses on them (for surely someone was buried underneath), and avoiding the cracks – so as not to “break your mother’s back.”

As I grew older, walking became an avenue of friendship, and romance.  By 6th grade, every weekend my group of friends would walk to the willows where we laughed, shared secrets and dreams. 8th grade brought the romantic gesture of adolescence of my boyfriend walking me home from school.  In high school, my best friend and I almost always had our conversations while walking around the village.  Perhaps that afforded us the space away from parents we needed, but mostly we enjoyed the walking and talking that seem to go together, the side-by-side movement facilitating easy talk.

The weaving of walking and friendship has been a throughline in my life.  Many of my fondest friendships have been forged on footpaths. From the Coastal Path of Cornwall to rural roads of northern Michigan to the sidewalks of Minneapolis and the trails, beaches, and Lakewalk of Duluth, sharing strides has led to sharing lives, often sharing our dogs as well.  Walking our dogs together became the weekly way of many friendships, even as our canine companions changed, or as some no longer walked with four-footed friends. A community has formed of those who regularly walk our dogs on the same trails.  We seem to learn each other’s dog’s names long before we know each other’s. Eventually we’ll move into – “I’m  ….” Some of us are meet-and-greet friends who share a few of the latest events of our lives, commiserate about bad weather, or express our enjoyment of the sunshine; others of us regularly walk together, giving our dogs a chance to romp together as well. We share a love of dogs and the outdoors.  We worry about each other when one hasn’t been on the trail for too long, mourn with each other when one of the pack dies, delight when joined by a new pup, and welcome the camaraderie that has grown up between us. The deepest friendship, however, is undoubtedly between my dogs and me. In our daily rambles, we come to learn each other’s ways, trust each other, enjoy each other’s company, and deepen our bond.

Covid elevated walking with friends to a new level of significance.  When we could no longer meet indoors over a cup of tea or lunch, we walked.  I walked with friends with whom I’d always walked and friends with whom I’d never walked before.  We celebrated each other’s birthdays, held meetings, and “did church” together while walking. As Covid continues for me as it does not for others, I feel so fortunate to have friends who are willing to continue walking with me. In Camus’s novel about an epidemic of plague, the two main characters decide to break quarantine and “go for a swim . . . for friendship’s sake” (231). In a strange turn, now to enable living within quarantine, we go for walks, for friendship’s sake.

As much as I love walking with friends, I often prefer, and need, solitary walks (though I’m rarely alone. The companionship of dogs provides the perfect blend of togetherness and solitude, and I am always in the company of trees, birds, rocks, water, and occasionally the moon.) Solitary walking opens my thought process -- letting ideas flow, knots untangle, and insights emerge.  Walking is where I practice contemplation, puzzle through concepts, and refine my writing.  Many of the ideas and wordings in this blog have emerged while walking. But mostly, solitary walking restores my soul. 

Labyrinth

Walking as a spiritual practice has a long tradition. Of the many exercises in Thich Nhat Hanh’s classic, The Miracle of Mindfulness, my favorite is mindful walking. In the years when I could not walk fast or far, I wandered into mindful walking unintentionally, and it kept me grounded through difficult days. I missed it when post-transplant I needed to walk briskly for heart health.  For centuries, contemplatives have walked the cloisters and labyrinths, but only recently has labyrinthine walking become widely practiced for its spiritual centering and healing qualities.  A friend with an oft-agitated autistic son mowed a large labyrinth in her meadow so that he could find moments of peace and calm while walking it.  I would sometimes walk my particularly rambunctious dog, Lucie, there, and it would calm her as well.  When teaching students about prayer, we would visit a nearby retreat center to walk the labyrinth there in a form of walking prayer. Psychologist Dacher Keltner recommends the practice of “awe walking” as a way intentionally to get daily doses of awe for all of its benefits to our spiritual, social, and personal well-being.

When I was a camp counselor, each week we took our campers on “trust walks” as both a spiritual and a bonding exercise.  In a trust walk, everyone except the leader is blindfolded. Each walker places their hands on the person ahead of them, and together they walk woodland trails guided only by their trust in the movements of the person ahead of them.  The ultimate and most awe-inspiring trust walk I ever did was when rather than being the leader, I was a participant, putting my full trust and all of my campers’ trust in my co-counselor, who was blind, to lead the way.

The turnstile

I fell in love with walking in a whole new way in Great Britan, where I discovered an entire culture devoted to walking. Despite the history of enclosure[iv] and the multiplicity of walls and fences crisscrossing the countryside of the island nation, or perhaps in defiance of these, the British people have embraced “rambling,” as it is known there, as their national pastime. No sooner had the land begun to be enclosed than “the great trespasses and walks that changed the face of the English countryside” began (Solnit 164). In response to the movement for access, city councils were required to map the rights-of-ways in their jurisdictions. Now, in every bookstore and corner shop one can find Ordnance Survey maps marking the footpaths, fences, and terrains of every section of the country, making vast stretches of meadows and moors, bens and fens open to all, with the signature British turnstile opening the right-of-way of ramblers who encounter a wall or fence. The footpaths of Britain beckoned me -- from the slopes of Ben Am to the rocky cliffs of Cornwall to the farmlands outside Coventry. 

In the US, we’ve adopted a bit of this in trail systems, like our local Superior Hiking Trail, but many are the places I’ve wanted to amble that are off limits in this culture defined by private property and no trespassing laws. In sharp reversal of its 18th and 19th century “clearances”[v] in which thousands of crofters were evicted, recently Scotland opened all of its land, so that with the exception of a certain amount of area around private dwellings, every bit of land is now available to be tramped, walked, and rambled.  How wonderful that would be.

Some of my most memorable walks have been in the streets, in solidarity with others, exercising the people’s right to assemble and move together.  As feminist essayist Rebecca Solnit has written, “the street is democracy’s greatest arena, the place where ordinary people can speak, unsegregated by walls, unmediated by those with more power.  . . . Public marches mingle with the language of the pilgrimage  . . . , with the strike’s picket line . . . , and the festival in which boundaries between strangers recede.  . . . They signify the possibility of common ground between people who have not ceased to be different from each other, people who have at last become the public” (216-217). Marches both create and signify solidarity, as well as commitment to a cause, and in our together walking we create the “collective effervescence”[vi] that can restore our hope and our conviction. I participated in my first march when I was a first-year student in college protesting the war in Vietnam.  Beginning with speeches from my favorite professors, and singing “Ohio,”“Give Peace a Chance,” and “Blowin’ In the Wind,” we proceeded to march from the archway of the main campus building to the Presbyterian church where we stayed in candlelight vigil all night.  That march was the first of many -- for peace, the ERA, racial justice, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, climate justice, and reproductive justice; to resist war, pipelines, unfair labor practices, and cruel immigration policies, and to Take Back the Night; to commemorate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the deaths of far too many victims of mass shootings. I have sung, drummed, chanted, and marched in reverent silence through these streets more times than I can possibly remember. 

In January 2017 we joined with millions around the world in the Women’s March. Thousands of us gathered in St. Paul.  We were a defiant, jubilant, resistant, raging, and raucous maelstrom of marchers.  I marched with longtime friends and newfound compatriots. Somehow in the throng of marchers, I managed to find my son, as well as students from generations past and present, and we marched together in concert and conviction.  When we turned the corner to the point where we could see the full length of our procession, my heart soared. The next year in the Duluth women’s march, indigenous women were invited to be at the front, and as one of the peacekeepers, I was honored to walk there as well, alongside my friend, Leah, as she led us all in the Anishinaabe woman-honoring song.  

Which brings me to the gendered nature of walking. It was in walking the streets of our small village with friends as a young teen that I first encountered the male gaze, when a carful of boys circled several times, much to our bemusement, but then pulled up and tried to entice us into their car.  Thus did our collective pleasure in our ability to attract turn to fear in recognizing the dangers lurking behind the false face of flattery.  So began the years of street harassment – the whistles, the attention-seeking shouts, the unwanted advances.  How I would have loved to walk the streets of Paris without being approached, propositioned, followed.  I was only able to enjoy the nighttime ambience of the Old City of Dubrovnik when joined by a male friend.  Girls learn early that they are not safe to walk alone, unaccompanied by a man, especially at night.  While we in the West may decry the laws of Saudi Arabia or Iran disallowing women to walk in public unaccompanied by a man, most of us are similarly confined by a culture that still regards the only place for a woman to be behind walls – and if not, she is considered fair game to be preyed upon.  Susan Griffin writes of the many ways that girls become learned in the fear of rape. “All the little girls who were menaced in their solitary journeys – Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks – the woods being the place where Snow White could be found if the woodsman had wanted to cut out her heart . . . . I have been told often not to go into the woods alone”(49).  I have been so warned as well, and yet I do, nearly every day, to venture to those places in the world and in myself where I can best listen to my inner voice and that of the divine. Of course, most often I am accompanied by my silent and faithful companion, who makes my fearless solitary forays into the forest possible in so many ways.  A friend once said that dogs are not man’s best friend; they are women’s. “How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand it I do not know, but I have ground to suspect that most of them do not STAND it at all,” mused Thoreau (3).  He was right.  From Take Back the Night marches to MMIW ceremonies, from the Peace Pilgrim[vii] to Cheryl Strayed’s solo thru hike on the Pacific Coast Trail[viii], from Sally Miller Gearhart’s utopian world of the Wanderground[ix] to the Women’s March, women have been claiming our right to walk freely and safely in the world.

Ben Lomond

Ben Lomond

I recently heard indigenous elder Pat McCabe describe herself as an “earth walker.”  It’s a lovely appellation -- joining together humans with deer and dogs, cats and coyotes, lizards and llamas, penguins and peacocks, turtles and tarantulas, emus and elephants -- and one I plan to adopt in honor of this privilege of ambulating about the world.  May that I never take this gift for granted. And here I need to close -- my dog, Ben Lomond, named for the mountain in Scotland I encountered on a ramble, is reminding me it’s time for our walk.

Ben Lomond

 Sources

Camus, Albert. 1948. The Plague.  Trans. Stuart Gilbert.  New York: Random House.

Griffin, Susan. 1979.  Rape: The Power of Consciousness. San Francisco: Harper and Row.

Hanh, Thich Nhat. 1991. The Miracle of Mindfulness. Rider Books.

Gearhart, Sally Miller. 1978. The Wanderground. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press.

Keltner, Dacher. 2023. Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.” New York: Penguin.

Solnit, Rebecca. 2000. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin Books.

Strayed, Cheryl. 2013. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. New York: Vintage.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walking. A Public Domain Book. Based on a lecture given at the Concord Lyceum, 1851.

Winchester, Simon. 2021. Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World. New York: HarperCollins.

[i] The “triple threat” or “unhappy triad” knee injury in my case involved the complete tear of the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and partial tears of the medial collateral ligament (MCL) and the medial meniscus.

[ii] Among the most well-known are Henry David Thoreau’s essay, “Walking”; Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking; Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking; Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail; Geoff Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, and Literature of Pedestrianism; Colin Fletcher, The Complete Walker. My favorite book on walking not in general, but in a specific place, is Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path, about the Coastal Path in Cornwall.

[iii] Naturalist John Muir, whom many hikers revere, disliked the word “hike.”  Considering the mountains to be holy land, he thought people ought to saunter, not hike, through them.  JOHN MUIR and 'SAUNTER' (etymonline.com)

[iv] See my post “Vastness,” April 20, 2023.

[v] The Scottish “clearances” were 18th and 19th century forced evictions of thousands of people who dwelt on the land owned by feudal lords – the crofters – so that the landowners could use the land to raise sheep.

[vi] Émile Durkheim’s term for the qualities of collective experiences, what Dacher Keltner describes as the “buzzing and crackling with some life force that merges people into a collective self, a tribe, an oceanic ‘we’” (13).

[vii] The Peace Pilgrim, Mildred Lisette Norman, was the first woman to walk the full-length of the Appalachian Trail in one season. During the Korean War, she began walking across the United States for peace.  She continued walking, spreading her message of peace, crossing the United States nearly seven times, for the next 28 years.  Ironically, she died in a car accident while on her way to a speaking engagement. 

[viii] In her book, Wild, Cheryl Strayed gives her account of walking alone as a woman across the Pacific Crest Trail.

[ix] In her fantasy utopian world, the Wanderground, Sally Miller Gearhart imagines a compassionate, safe, mystical and magical world of women inside of which men’s penises and combustion engines fail to work and do no harm.

Vastness

-          from the Latin “vastus” –the quality of being immense

In the past several days, people have thronged to the St. Louis River, Gooseberry Falls, the Temperance, the Cascade, the Lester to experience the immensity of rushing waters, waterfalls, and expanding floodplains.  They are all in search of awe.

“What is an experience of awe that you have had, when you encountered a vast mystery that transcends your understanding of the world?” (xix).  Psychologist Dacher Keltner and his collaborator, Yang Bai, asked this question of 2600 people in 26 countries around the world. They were seeking an answer to the questions 1) what is awe, and 2) what leads people to feel awe.

They discovered that universally “eight wonders of life” consistently evoke the experience of awe. First and foremost is what they termed “moral beauty” -- “other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming” (11). Second is “collective effervescence” – a sense of “we” experienced at weddings, graduations, sporting events, political rallies.  Third is nature; fourth – music; fifth – visual design; sixth – spiritual and religious awe; seventh – birth and death; and finally – epiphanies – “when we suddenly understand essential truths about life” (17).

They also asked the “so what?” question, that my philosophy professors required be addressed in every paper we wrote, and found that awe makes us better. People who experience awe are more open to new ideas, curious, thoughtful, generous, kind, willing to put aside self-interest in favor of others, less prone to political polarization, less likely to experience anxiety and depression, and more likely to experience joy.

They found that regardless of the source, the experience of awe followed a distinct pattern -- “vastness, mystery, and the dissolving of boundaries between the self and other sentient beings” (124-125). What strikes me most in this is the notion of “vastness.” Vastness, Keltner writes, can be physical – whether standing next to towering trees, looking out over the vast expanse of the ocean, or witnessing the power of roots to grow on rock, or hearing a singer’s voice, or feeling the exquisite softness of a newborn babe’s skin; or temporal – such as a scent or a piece of music that transports you back in time; or about ideas – such as an epiphany that helps you make sense of the world.

“The content of what is vast varies dramatically across cultures and the contexts of our lives,” writes Keltner. “In some places it is high-altitude mountains, and in others flat never-ending plains with storms approaching. For infants it is the immense warmth provided by parents, and when we die, the enormous expanse of our lives. . . . The varieties of vastness are myriad, giving rise to shifts in the meaning of awe” (8).

But vastness is not just about immensity of things and experiences, but also the way vastness serves to dissolve boundaries, thus connecting us with something greater than ourselves, and uniting us into community. Yet, the past several hundred years of Western culture have been devoted to the erection of boundaries – personal, political, religious, racial, ideological, and physical.

In his study of land, British-American journalist Simon Winchester found that to inquire into the fate of land around the world was necessarily to study the creation of boundaries. Whether by hedgerows, fences, walls, barbed wire, and no trespassing signs surrounding “private” property, or the political boundaries drawn between counties and states and nation-states – by the creation of boundaries, every square inch of land (and most bodies of water) on this earth can be designated as “owned” by some person(s), group, corporation, or political entity. 

This was not always the case.  In the time before boundaries, the world was vast.  Or as English philosopher John Locke wrote in 1690, “in the beginning, all the world was America,” when America was still a land without fences, walls, and nation-state borders, but rather a land of vast forests, plains, mountains, fish, fowl, and four-footed.  So different was this from life in England, where as early as 1086, the entirety of England had been surveyed and recorded in the Domesday Book at the behest of William the Conqueror – who became King William I – so that he could have a record of his holdings and how much was due him in taxes. In 1773 the Parliamentary “Act of Inclosure” codified the enclosure of the “commons” – the land common to all, available for the growing of crops and the grazing of cattle -- by the feudal lords. Each enclosure required the approval of Parliament, which it gave 5000 times through the 18th and 19th centuries.[i]  According to the Act, the enclosures were designed “for the better Cultivation, Improvement, and Regulation of the common Arable Fields, Waste, and Commons of Pasture in this Kingdom” (quoted in Winchester, 177).  The Crown of England declared the commons “wastelands.”

Wasteland. Wasted land.  “Land that is left wholly to nature,” wrote Locke, “that hath no improvement of pasturage, tillage, or planting, is called, as indeed it is, waste; . . . “ (26).  Waste –  from the Latin vastus – meaning “empty, desolate”; “immense, extensive, huge.” Or according to the Oxford English Dictionary:  1.“uninhabited or uncultivated country; a wild and desolate region, a desert, a wilderness; 2. “a piece of land not cultivated or used for any purpose, producing little . . . “; 4. “of speech, thought, or action: profitless . . . “ Vast – also from the Latin vastus – meaning “empty, desolate” or” immense, extensive, huge.”  Or according to the OED: 1. “a vast or immense space.”

When did “vast” become “waste”?  When did the experience of vastness signify a wasteland?  I first encountered this use of “waste” in Locke’s defining view on “property,” in which he makes the case for the legitimacy of ownership of private property and the unequal distribution of wealth. “As much land that a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, enclose it from the common” (20).  In doing so, not only does “a man” come to own property, he fulfills God’s commandment. “God, and his reason,” Locke continued, “commanded him to subdue the earth – i.e., improve it for the benefit of life . . .” (20).

Locke was not the first or only to make this argument. The Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius claimed the same in nearly the same language several decades previously, “’land which lies common, and hath never beene replenished or subdued, is free to any that possesse and improve it’” (Grotius quoted in Winchester, 129).  A few years later, John Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, would argue, based on God’s command in Genesis I:28 for man to subdue the earth, that it was man’s “Christian duty” to “improve” the land – meaning to fence it in, cultivate it, and produce profit from it.

So when Europeans became aware of the vastness that was pre-contact America, they came in droves to enclose and “improve” the land. In this they were spurred on by the Papal Doctrine of Discovery granting them full religious authority to appropriate and claim title to the land,[ii] ignoring the fact that vast numbers of people already lived here. And so, as Winchester writes, “the rush to gather up the spoils -- the land and its landscapes, soon to be deconsecrated and commodified – got ponderously under way” (132). “Every effort had the same theme,” writes ecofeminist Susan Griffin, “those whose lands were taken were being improved” (100). As she so eloquently states, “In the Western habit of mind, the earth is no longer enchanted with its own significance. A forest exists for lumber. Trees for oxygen. A field for grazing. Rocks for minerals. Water for irrigation” (56).

This ideology that land that is not being cultivated, mined, lumbered, or otherwise used to create goods and capital is ‘waste” continues its devastating effects to this day in mountaintop removal, destruction of old growth forests, fracking and drilling and mining of once pristine lands, plowing the plains into dust and spreading herbicides and pesticides over the land. Devastate - from the Latin devastare, meaning to “lay waste, ravage, make desolate.” Devastate – to de-vast — i.e., to destroy the vastness. And so has the vastness that was the lands of the Americas —as well as other continents — been plundered, laid waste, so as not to “waste” it.

“Our default minds, so focused on independence and competitive advantage, are not well-suited to making sense of the vast,” explains Keltner. “So guided are we by prior knowledge and our need for certainty that we avoid or explain away the mysteries of life” (178). Perhaps not knowing how to make sense of such vastness, the settler colonialists instead saw only ways to  declare their independence from feudal lords, from one another, and the earth; to regard each other as competitors rather than community; and enclose all that was vast and render it small, manageable. In doing so, they wasted a far more valuable opportunity – to experience, appreciate, and learn from the awe vastness inspires. How different a country, a people, a land might we be if we had merely been awestruck – and thereby become curious, more open to learning, better able to welcome difference, more willing to make sacrifices for others, more united in community with every and all sentient beings.  How different if we had listened and learned from those inhabitants of this land who already knew how to live in intimate relationship with the land in ways that preserved and respected its vastness.

In the 1990s, biologist Janine Benyus coined the term “biomimicry,” a different, though ancient, approach to the natural world. In Krista Tippett’s words, biomimicry is “a design discipline that takes the natural world as mentor and teacher” to solve complex human problems. “In a society accustomed to dominating or ‘improving’ nature, this respectful imitation is a radically new approach, a revolution really,” writes Benyus. “The Biomimicry Revolution introduces an era based not on what we can extract from nature, but on what we can learn from her” (2). She continues, “We can decide as a culture to listen to life, echo what we hear, to not be a cancer. . . . we can make the conscious choice to follow nature’s lead in living our lives” (297). I find hope in the ways that principles of biomimicry are beginning to be used by engineers, architects, builders, farmers, to find better, more sustainable ways to create the products we use in our everyday lives – from the food we eat, to the ways we heal, to “gathering energy like a leaf,” “weaving fibers like a spider,” and “conducting business like a redwood forest” (i).

“For too long,” Benyus writes, “we have judged our innovations by whether they are good for us, which has increasingly come to mean whether they are profitable. Now we have to put what is good for life first” (291).

But what’s more, Benyus continues, “ . . . biomimics develop a high degree of awe, bordering on reverence” (7). In a recent interview with Tippett, Benyus told the story of a desalination engineer who was in tears with an epiphany he had in a mangrove swamp. “He said, ‘How is it that in my education . . . ? I’ve been doing this work for 30 years, 40 years. I’m a desalination expert. I filter salt from water. And this plant has its roots in saltwater, and it’s solar powered, and it’s desalinating.’ He said, ‘I’m crying because it’s beautiful and because no one ever told me.’”  Tears, along with chills, and “Whoas” are the universal responses to awe – here the awe of epiphanies, the awe of nature.

Keltner suggests we regularly take time for awe.  I’m fortunate to live in a place where I can daily witness the vast expanse of Lake Superior, but awe is accessible to us all.  Get outside, Keltner encourages. Getting outdoors – whether to experience the wild rivers and waterfalls or to appreciate the wonder of a warbler’s song or the crystalline pattern of a snowflake creates in us an experience of wild awe wherein we come to revere the natural world.  We need merely to appreciate the vastness, let our boundaries dissolve, and connect to the earth, each other, and the universe in awe.

 

 

Sources

Benyus, Janine M. 1997. Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. New York: HarperCollins.

Chollet, Mona. 2022. In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial. Trans. Sophie R. Lewis. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Griffin, Susan. 1995. The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society.  New York: Anchor Books.

Keltner, Dacher. 2023. Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.” New York: Penguin.

Locke, John. 1690/ 1960. Second Treatise on Civil Government: An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government. In Social Contract: Essays by Locke, Hume, and Rousseau.  With an Introduction by Sir Ernest Barker. London: Oxford U. Press. 1-143.

Shiva, Vandana. 2005. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press.

Tippett, Krista. (host). (2023, March 23). Janine M. Benyus: Biomimicry: An Operating Manual for Earthlings. [audio podcast]. Retrieved from Janine Benyus — Biomimicry, an Operating Manual for Earthlings | The On Being Project.

Winchester, Simon. 2021. Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World. New York: HarperCollins.

 




[i] The enclosure of the commons was particularly hard on women, who depended disproportionately on the commons to graze cows and gather herbs. For many, it ended their independence, with the oldest often reduced to begging. (See Mona Chollet’s In Defense of Witches.)  Ecofeminist Vandana Shiva has commented extensively on the effects of the British enclosure of the commons in India following conquest, holding it responsible for the impoverishment of the Indian people.  She extends this to contemporary forms of enclosure of globalization and free trade: “Globalization and free trade decimate the conditions for productive, creative employment by enclosing the commons, which are necessary for the sustenance of life” (14).

[ii] The Doctrine of Discovery, which gave official Church sanction to conquest of lands and peoples, was granted by Pope Nicholas V in his 1454 papal bull giving dispensation to the Portuguese to seize any land and peoples in Africa south of Cape Bojador.  Other European countries adopted their own versions of it so that by merely planting a flag they would declare land theirs.

Becoming Grandma

“We’ve all witnessed the power of a moment when an elder holds a newborn babe. There’s this unique bond that connects these seemingly disparate ages. However, there is nothing more profound than these two ages witnessing one another.”  - Mary DeJong

On Sunday, I held my son’s newborn babe for the first time.  “Who are you?,” I asked. Expecting my grandson to be a carbon copy of my son when he was newly born, I was surprised instead to encounter a whole new being who was not my son, but entirely himself.  Clearly, we were witnessing one another as we gazed into each other’s eyes. Did he know me, my voice, my touch?  Or did he also wonder, “Who are you?” I expect we will spend the next several months and years learning who we are to each other.   

So many people have told me that I’ll be a wonderful grandma, but I’m not sure I even know what that means.  I never expected to have the chance to be a mom, let alone a grandma. And now this unexpected gift. I saw my own grandmas only on rare occasions – a trip to visit my dad’s parents once a summer, and the usual Christmas and springtime visits of my mom’s mother. 

Grandma

My grandmas were very different from each other.  My older brother, who had many more years than I with Grandma, my dad’s mother – I was only seven when she died – describes her as the quintessential grandma – just a soft bundle of love. Her house was magical.  We entered on the upper floor of the bedrooms and walked downstairs to get to the living room and kitchen.  We slept on the big sleeping porch with the huge wide beds for all the grandchildren.  The house was filled with Hummel figurines and a cuckoo clock and always the candy jar filled with M&Ms. I mostly remember her as soft, and soft-spoken, in her old-fashioned grandma dresses with eyes magnified by her cataract glasses and a little wobbly in her walk, nearly always in the kitchen and giving us cookies. Sweet, tender.

Nana

My mom’s mother, Nana, came to our house by bus from Detroit. I remember her violet hair from the bluing older women used on gray hair at that time, and the lemon water she drank every morning, and can still hear her voice.  I have pictures of her reading to me, but mostly I remember her teaching me how to play cribbage.  We spent hours pegging; counting -- 15 -2, 15-4, and a pair are 6; and seeing what surprises the crib held.  In her later years, she suffered many small strokes, and taught me patience as I learned calmly to repeat my answer to the questions she asked over and over and over again.  Nana was a teacher, and I felt like we related to each other in the same way as my teachers and I did – kindly, even affectionately, but with a certain reserve. 

My mom

I don’t see myself as being like either of my grandmothers, though I can certainly see myself as the grandma who is feeding and baking cookies and quick to offer a comforting hug, and I’m looking forward to all the books my grandchild and I will read together, but my son will undoubtedly teach his son cribbage before I ever have a chance.  If anyone, I imagine myself a bit like my mom was to me when I was a child – the fun parts, yes, and she could be great fun –laughing uproariously, playing games, taking us on picnics and cookouts and to the shores of Lake Michigan, speeding around curvy roads singing “Around the corner, and under a tree . . .,” racing home to be at the cabin in time for the sunset; but also nurturing my mind, body, and rebellious ecofeminist spirit – teaching me to love the earth, question everything, and never blindly obey; and always being a source of security, comfort, and unconditional love.

My son never knew his grandmas.  My mother had died years before he was born, and my husband’s mother was actively dying of cancer when Paul was born.  I remember the sadness in her eyes when she held him for the first time.  How difficult for her to greet the long-awaited firstborn of her own son, knowing that her first glimpse was also probably her last. 

But my son has wonderful aunts. It is the role of aunt that I know best. I’ve loved being an aunt – the playmate, confidante, companion, comforter, buddy, friend. How will it be different to be a grandma?

I remember little of what was said at keynotes at academic conferences over the years, but I will always remember Rayna Green talking about being an Indian grandma in her keynote to the National Women’s Studies Association in 1988. “To be an Indian grandma is probably the nicest thing that could ever happen to anybody . . . , “  she said. So many of my friends who are grandmas say it’s just the best.  But it’s also a responsibility.  As Green continued, “To be an Indian grandma is an extraordinary role . . . The role of grandma to teach, to be wise, and bring that wisdom to bear upon the teaching of young people is enormous” (66). A few months ago I witnessed my friend, who is an Anishianaabe ookomisan, teaching her grandson a basic life skill of how to cook an omelet, but also giving life lessons of how to be respectful — to turn down the music — and how to be loving, through her own kind and generous, affirming and loving words and actions toward him. All of this in less than an hour. Perhaps it is as simple and basic as that.

I’ve envisioned times with my grandchild -- passing along those bits of wisdom I didn’t know in time to pass along to my own child, sharing the wonder of woodland wild flowers and mosses, of stars and sunrises, delighting in waves and first snowfalls, and late night (or more likely, early morning) laughter and conversations when his parents are asleep.  All that is yet to unfold. 

Spiritual writer Malidoma Patrice Somé wrote of how in the Dagara culture of Burkina Faso, children spend the first few years of their lives with their grandparents. Because grandchildren come from the cosmos to which the grandparents will soon return, the grandparents need to learn all the news that the grandchild bears quickly, before the child forgets. In the first few months and years of my own child’s life, it was clear to me that he came bearing great wisdom.  By the time he was four, the memories had faded and he would need to spend to the rest of his years re-learning all that he knew when he was born, just as we all do.  I may have been close enough to the end of my life at that time to have learned some from him, but now I will have another opportunity.

“Life beginning and life ending merge in the connection of young and old.   The wise ones see what others do not,” said ecotheologist Mary DeJong in her reflections on winter. Wisdom bearers – is that what grandparents and grandchildren are to each other?  Surely. But the words of Brian Swimme echo most in my mind – “ . . . the primary deed of a parent is to see the beauty, and grace of children” (32).  So even more must it be the deed of a grand- parent “to feel and cherish [the child’s] beauty. . . . fall in love with this magnificent creature . . . celebrate its splendor” (32). What better role in life could there be? 

Who are you, dear Martin? I look forward to our getting to know each other, to our growing loving connection, to learning all that you have to teach me and passing along what wisdom I’ve gleaned in seventy years, and in delighting with each other in all the wonders life holds — in other words, to becoming grandma.

The picture on my April calendar. “Ganawendiwag” - meaning “they take care of each other.” Artwork by Chimakwa Nibaawii Stone, Lac de Flambeau Ojibwe.

Sources

DeJong, Mary. “Wild Winter.” Waymarkers.

Green, Rayna. 1990. “American Indian Women: Diverse Leadership for Social Change,” in Lisa Albrecht and Rose M. Brewer in conjunction with the National Women’s Studies Association. Bridges of Power: Women’s Multicultural Alliances.  Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers. 61-73.

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

Breath

By breath, by blood, by body, by spirit, we are all one.

 The air that is my breath . . . is the air that you are breathing./ And the air that is your breath . . . is the air that I am breathing./ The wind rising in my breast . . . Is the wind, from the east, from the west,/ From the north . . . from the south; Breathing in, breathing out.

 So begins singer-songwriter Sara Thomsen’s song, “By Breath,” bringing together many elements I’ve been pondering in the last several days – breath, air, wind, spirit.

In cultures around the world, each of the four seasons is associated with one of the four cardinal directions and one of the four elements – earth, air, fire, water.  In this season of winter, the associated direction is north, and the element is air. In these last few days of wild winter, the air from the north has indeed been making its presence known. The wind has been fierce, powerful, sculpting the snow into huge drifts and whipping up waves on the great lake, forming cliffs of ice on the rocks that line the shore.  It is as if these last gasps of winter are saying, “Air is my element and wind my breath. Remember the air is sacred.” 

 The sheer force and power of the wind has often been associated with the divine — “And there went forth a wind from the Lord . . . “ (Numbers 11:31); “See, the Lord has one who is powerful and strong. Like a hailstorm and a destructive wind” (Isaiah 28: 2); “Therefore this is what the Sovereign LORD says: In my wrath I will unleash a violent wind” (Ezekiel 13:13). Or as novelist Zora Neale Hurston wrote in describing the coming of the great Okeechobee hurricane, “The wind came back with triple fury, and put out the light for the last time. They sat in company with the others in other shanties, their eyes straining against crude walls and their souls asking if He meant to measure their puny might against His. They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God” (151-152).

So often on my winter walks, I find myself bracing against the wind, fending off the biting cold, made even sharper by the wind.  But in the course I’ve been taking on “rewilding,” one of the practices suggested for winter is to engage the wind, rather than buffer against it, and see how that shifts one’s experience of the season.  Indeed, on the day I participated in this practice, I found my spirit enhanced, lightened, inspired.  Spirit – from the Latin spiritus, meaning “spirit, soul”; inspire, inspiration – also from the Latin inspiritus, meaning “to breathe into, to inspire,” and in English – “to draw breath into the lungs.” Here is yet another understanding of air as sacred, as divine, as spirit, and as inspiration -- the divine expressing itself through us. 

 The Hebrew word for breath is the same as the word for spirit –ruach.  The spirit is invoked in the beginning  --  “ . . . and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit (Ruach) of God was hovering over the surface of the water” (Genesis 1:2).  The word ruach is feminine, and the Holy Spirit is often regarded as the feminine divine, which is so often represented in creatures that fly through the air and glide on its currents — birds. In the case of the Holy Spirit, it is a dove, but we have unearthed so many others in archeological digs and ancient legends – the Minoan bird goddesses, the winged Isis, the Sumerian Lilith, the Celtic Rhiannon. As artist Judith Shaw wrote, “. . . from the great quantity of statues found . . . it is easy to believe that the Bird Goddess was seen as a divine being who nurtured and protected the world.” She goes on to say that the ancient Bird Goddess ruled over life and death – the first breath and the last.

 Much has been written about the last breath, but not about the first. About the same time, perhaps even the same day as I practiced engaging the wind, I happened to listen to a re-broadcast of an episode of NPR’s Radiolab on “Breath.”  It began with an explanation of the ingenious, miraculous first breath in which we humans transition from water-dwelling beings in the watery womb to air-dwelling beings outside in the world.  In the water-dwelling fetus, the lungs have no function. Instead, the fetus gets its oxygen from its mother through the placenta and umbilical cord, the oxygenated blood flowing directly from the right to the left chambers of the heart through a hole -- the patent foramen ovale -- bypassing the lungs that in fetuses are filled with water.  But in the split second of that first breath, the umbilical cord shuts down the flow of oxygenated blood and the patent foramen ovale closes, requiring that the once water-filled lungs now be filled with air.  The right and left sides of the heart now forever closed off from each other, from now on, the oxygen-deprived blood that flows into the right side of the heart must now be pumped out of the heart into the lungs where it is enriched with oxygen, and then returns to the left chambers of the heart where it is then pumped to every tissue in our bodies.  That first breath enables the continual flow of in-breath and out-breath, for most of us about 500 million times in our lifetimes. I will never forget that first breath of my own child as he came into the air-breathing world. That first cry remains, and always will, the sweetest sound I have ever heard. Aware now of all that happens with that first breath, I am filled with an even deeper awe.

 Most of the time we breathe without thinking.  Regulated by a pacemaker in the brain, our breathing mostly happens on its own without our conscious effort. We can so easily forget the preciousness of our being able to breathe — until we can’t.  As a child with asthma, I early on had a bodily awareness of how easily breathing could become difficult, and at times impossible. So many suffer from impaired breath --whether from lung disease, or polluted air, or the choking smoke of wildfires which are becoming larger and more frequent. I remember vividly when indigenous elders who had traveled here from British Columbia for a training in which I participated, told us of how the fires there were so intense that they had been forced to stay inside much of the month of August. They had hoped to be able to get a breath of fresh air here in Duluth. Instead, they found that even here, a few thousand miles distant, the smoke from those same fires could be smelled and filled the sky with a lingering haze. We are all breathing the same air.

Just as we are all breathing the same air of systems of oppression – of patriarchy, hierarchy, mind/body value dualism, [i] and as Isabel Wilkerson has enlightened us, of caste.  As I write this, the words of George Floyd pinned under Derrick Chauvin’s knee — “I can’t breathe” — echo in my mind. The same paradigm of Western thought that ranks human beings above “nature” (as if we were not nature), allowing us to degrade the atmosphere, ranks some human beings above others, contributing to the poisoning of all our relations.  

Will we rise to the best of our possibilities, to join those whom Albert Camus called the “true healers” – those who refuse to be cast among the “victims” or the “pestilences,” but rather seek to help those struggling to breathe – whether literally or metaphorically?  We see them on the front lines of those who would protect the earth – the water protectors at Standing Rock and Line 3, the forest protectors at Cop City[ii], the Greenpeace activists across the globe demanding “Clean Air Now,”[iii] the young people raising the alarm on climate change; we see them among those who would disrupt the foundations of these systems --  whether in the streets  or in courtrooms or in the writings and voices of the historians and the seers -- Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ibram X. Kendi, Isabel Wilkerson, Susan Griffin, Gerda Lerner, Robin Wall Kimmerer[iv]; just as surely as we saw the paramedics, the respiratory therapists, the doctors and nurses on the front lines of the pandemic. [v] It is so fitting that “I can’t breathe” has become the rallying cry of those demanding a just world where all can breathe.

Soon, my first grandchild will take that first precious breath.  As I look into his future, I wonder, what will be the quality of the air that he — and all beings — breathe? In what atmospheres will we dwell? Perhaps the answer lies in the quality of all our relations.

 “They say our fate is with the wind,” writes ecofeminist Susan Griffin. She asks, “Will we take what the wind gives, or even know what is given when we see it?  . . Do our whole bodies listen?   . . . Can we give to the wind what is asked of us? . . . will we be able to hear the wind singing and will we answer?  Can we sing back?” (222).

What will be the nature of our song?  Will we learn . . .

 By breath, by blood, by body, by spirit, we are all one.

Sources

“Breath.” June 11, 2021. Radiolab.org

Camus, Albert. 1948. The Plague. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Random House.

Griffin, Susan. 1978. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her.  New York: Harper & Row, Publishers.

Hurston, Zora Neale. 1937, 1990. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers.

Shaw, Judith. “The Bird Goddess.” Feminism and Religion Blog Post.  November 23, 2016.  The Bird Goddess by Judith Shaw (feminismandreligion.com)

Thomsen, Sara. 2003. “By Breath.”

Wilkerson, Isabel. 2020. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. New York: Random House.

[i) Mind-body value dualism is the system of Western thought in which related pairs of things are arbitrarily posited as opposites — in this case mind and body, with the mind being valued more than the body. What follows is that those things associated with the mind are valued more than those things associated with the body — men vs. women, humans vs. animals, white people vs. BIPOC persons, culture vs. nature, humans vs. nature, Western/Euro vs. “Third World,” colonizer vs. colonized.

[ii] Cop City is the name forest protectors have given to a proposed training complex for police and fire fighters that if constructed would require the razing of an 85-acre old growth forest outside of Atlanta, Georgia.

 [III] Our global movement against air pollution - Greenpeace International

[iv] These are among the dozens of scholars who have delved into the depths of the foundations of these systems of oppression.  Nikole Hannah-Jones is the journalist behind The 1619 Project. Ibram X. Kendi is the author of among others, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America;  Isabel Wilkerson is the author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents; Susan Griffin is an ecofeminist essayist and poet and author of among others, The Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War and The Eros of Everyday Life. Gerda Lerner was the premiere historian of women’s history, and author of The Creation of Patriarchy. Robin Wall Kimmerer is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Reading the works of these authors would begin to give more depth to our understandings of the foundations of systems of oppression and how we might achieve a truly egalitarian society. 

[v] As a side note, I cannot begin to express my gratitude to those strangers, paramedics, doctors, and nurses who have literally breathed their breath into my lungs when I have suffered respiratory and cardiac arrests and my own breathing had stopped.  I owe the fact that I am alive and breathing to all of those who enabled me to breathe.

Remembering Feminism's Indigenous Roots

“The root of oppression is the loss of memory.”  

— Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop

In the late 1970s, I began work on my PhD dissertation, in search of the roots of early 19th century feminism in the US. Beyond the obvious striving for freedom, equality, respect, and dignity, I wanted to know who and what led women in the US to assert their value and worth as human beings, to demand full inclusion in society, to seek changes to laws and cultural mores. Because my doctoral degree was in political theory, I focused on three early 19th century feminist theorists – Frances Wright, Sarah Grimké, and Margaret Fuller.  I researched their lives, their work, their associations, and their intellectual influences – the books they read and the writers and philosophers whose work pervaded their own.  I found the roots to be quite varied – from the Scottish Enlightenment to the abolitionist movement to Transcendentalism.  Yet, as Keres author Paula Gunn Allen would note a few years later, her version of the roots of American feminism was “far removed [from that of] . . .  those steeped in either mainstream or radical versions of feminism’s history” (213-214).  As one who had contributed to that history, I feel it incumbent upon me to share what I had overlooked so long ago -- the most important root – the influence and example of indigenous women.[i]

In her essay, “Who Is Your Mother? Red Roots of White Feminism,” Allen explained how among indigenous societies “gynarchy was the norm  . . . and  . . .  femaleness was highly valued” (212). She demonstrated how these indigenous beliefs and values “became part of the vision of American feminists,” remarking that the 19th century feminists “chose to hold their founding convention . . . just a stone’s throw from the old council house where the Iroquois women had plotted their feminist rebellion” (213).[ii]

A few years after Allen wrote her piece, historian Sally Roesch Wagner explored this connection of the indigenous women of the Haudenosaunee nation[iii] with the early feminists who gathered to enumerate and demand their rights in the Declaration of Sentiments in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848, believing, in Wagner’s words, that “women’s liberation was possible because they knew women who possessed a position of respect and authority in their own egalitarian society – Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) women” (268). Through their close associations and friendships with the Haudenosaunee, these feminists learned of the freedom, equality, and respect the Haudenosaunee women experienced. The Haudenosaunee had strong cultural taboos against violence toward women, and rape in their society was virtually non-existent. The fact that a local reporter noted that among the Haudenosaunee “’a solitary woman may walk about for miles, at any of hour of the day and night, in perfect safety’” indicates how unusual this was (Beauchamp qtd. in Wagner, 271). Among the EuroAmericans at that time, it was legal and expected that a man beat his wife, within limits, but among the Haudenosaunee such behaviors were unthinkable and unacceptable. Unlike the EuroAmerican women who, when they married, lost all rights to their bodies, their children, their income and property, and to divorce, the Haudenosaunee women in marriage retained their full personhood and could “divorce” their husbands simply by placing their things outside their home and telling them to leave and return to their own clans. “Indian women's violence-free egalitarian home life could only have given suffragists a vision of how women should be treated, along with the sure knowledge that they, too, could create a social structure of equality,” Wagner posited. (276).

Far freer in their bodily autonomy and movement, the Haudenosaunee women inspired new clothing and women-centered birthing methods.  Many of the women of the area adopted the Native women’s dress of loose tunics and pantaloons, popularly known as “bloomers.”[iv]  Others learned Native forms of natural childbirth, most well-known among them being feminist activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who reportedly gave birth to her seven children with relative ease, in contrast to many of the white women of her day who increasingly relied on the male medical profession and were instructed by their male Christian pastors that it was their burden to bear children in pain.

The women learned as well about the importance of the indigenous concept of balance that required decisions to be made by consensus with everyone having an equal voice and with equal approval by women and men.  In Stanton’s living room, where many of the conversations about women’s rights occurred, all sat in a circle, using the indigenous practice of passing a talking stick to ensure that all would have an equal voice.  All of this would come to shape their vision for an egalitarian society, as well as the specific reforms they called for in the Declaration of Sentiments, the Married Women’s Property Act, the dress reform movement, their work to reform sexual mores and to bring an end to wife-beating, as well as their work for the full inclusion of women in the political decision-making process and women’s suffrage.

Fast forward 130 years to the time when the Second Wave feminist movement was coming into its own here in Duluth in the late 1970s and early 1980s. [v]  It was an exciting time, seeing the rise of grassroots feminist organizations – from the early days of rape crisis hotlines and battered women’s shelters to Women’s Studies programs and feminist coffeehouses, radio programs, and bookstores.[vi]  Grassroots feminist organizations here have played as significant a role in the Second Wave feminist movement as did the upstate New York women’s rights movement during the First Wave, and though the role of indigenous women in the work of feminist organizing in the Twin Ports has been different from that of those in upstate New York in the 19th century, it has had just as significant an influence in shaping the nature of feminist organizations here.

 130 years after the first Women’s Rights conference, non-Native women had made several of the gains they had originally sought – suffrage and a voice (though not yet equal) in political decision making, marriage reform, dress reform, education and employment, and some reproductive freedoms. Native women, on the other hand, due to conquest and colonization, had lost nearly all the freedoms, the respect, and the equality they once knew. Their spiritual traditions, language, and voice stripped away in boarding schools and forced assimilation; their  land and waters stolen, mined, and polluted; their bodies and spirits desecrated and destroyed,  Native women’s world was turned upside down.  With Western patriarchal values imposed on once egalitarian partnership societies, Native women now experience higher unemployment, lower levels of income and education, and higher rates of sexual assault and domestic violence than any other ethnic or racial group, and the numbers of missing and murdered indigenous women has become epidemic.  

 Native women have always found ways to assist each other, but it was not until the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act and the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act that indigenous peoples could fully begin to reclaim their language, culture, traditions, and values. At the heart of this, to quote the mission statement of Mending the Sacred Hoop, is the task to restore the “safety, sovereignty, and sacredness of Native women.” In Duluth, two organizations in particular – Mending the Sacred Hoop and the American Indian Community Housing Organization (AICHO)  --  have made celebrating the sacredness of women and restoring women’s dignity and respect central to their work. In their work with tribes across Indian Country, Mending the Sacred Hoop has acted to mitigate domestic violence, decolonize the dominance values imposed by white culture, and reclaim the original respect given to Native women. They have done the same working with local police and social service agencies, as well as the federal government in adding key provisions to the Violence Against Women Act.[vii]  They have trained dozens of advocates in indigenous trauma therapy to bring healing to indigenous peoples carrying generations of historical trauma.  AICHO has provided safe housing to women leaving situations of domestic abuse, as well as the unhoused, integrating traditional spiritual practices into their programming and inspiring women to respect themselves and other women through what Victoria Ybanez has called “creating sister space,” where when someone is in crisis, they create a space for her and treat her as they would a sister. Providing a gathering place for the community, they offer space for indigenous storytelling, speakers, feasts and ceremonies, and displays of indigenous art.

 Native women have been at the heart of bringing the honoring of and respect for women into the core of feminist work here. I have heard it in the voices of the women in the Women’s Action Group where, as Babette Sandman recalled, “We were believed, we had value, we had wisdom”; in the women-affirming music of the Northcountry Women’s Coffeehouse and Wise Women Radio, and in Women’s Studies classes where generation after generation of young people sitting in circles, each taking their turn, have found their voices and their truths honored and respected. I have heard it repeated by the women in these grassroots organizations who have spoken of the importance of staying true to their mission and of needing to be guided by the voices and wisdom of the women in their programs, and by the support of women for each other.  It is one of the key reasons for the thriving of feminism in this community. The predominant message at the core of the work is of the importance of the empowerment of and respect for women. It is a message that was inspired and continues to be renewed by the vibrant activism and inspiration of indigenous women.

 Paula Gunn Allen has wisely said, “feminists too often believe that no one has ever experienced the kind of society that empowered women and made that empowerment the basis of its rules of civilization.  The price the feminist community must pay because it is not aware of the recent presence of gynarchical societies on this continent is unnecessary confusion, division, and much lost time” (213).  How different this country might have been had those who landed on these shores listened and learned.  As Allen noted, “If American society judiciously modeled the traditions of the various Native Nations, the place of women in society would become central, the distribution of goods and power would be egalitarian, the elderly would be respected, . . . . the biota . . . and the spiritual nature of human and nonhuman life would become a primary organizing principle of human society, and  . . .war would cease to be a major method of human problem solving” (211).

The poster for Mending the Sacred Hoop pictures three women dancing, celebrating the sacredness of women. May we all learn from their wisdom and work for the day when the sacredness of and respect for women is integral to society, and the sacred hoop is restored.

 Sources

 Allen, Paula Gunn. 1986. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press. 

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

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

 Sandman, Babette. Personal Interview. December 11, 2014.

 Wagner, Sally Roesch. 2004. “The Indigenous Roots of American Feminism.” In Feminist Politics, Activism, and Vision: Local and Global Challenges.  Ed. by Luciana Ricciutelli, Angela Miles, and Margaret H. McFadden. 267-283. London and New York: Zed Books.

 Ybanez, Victoria. Skype Interview. October 29, 2014.

[i] Most of what I have included here of the importance of the Haudenosaunee women to the 19th century women’s rights movement and of indigenous women to the feminist movement in Duluth was in my original draft of Making Waves.  However, the external reviewer insisted that this and other important roots, such as the role of the Benedictines, be removed before they would approve publication, requiring instead that I include the influence of East and West Coast Second Wave feminism, which was not nearly as important to the unique feminist movement here, and once again silencing and making invisible the importance of indigenous women to US feminism.

 [ii] The Iroquois nation – or as they refer to themselves, the Haudenosaunee – gathered on the shores of Lake Onondaga, in what is now Syracuse, New York.  The first Women’s Rights convention was held less than forty miles away in Seneca Falls, New York.  The Iroquois feminist revolution to which she refers was a Lysistrata-like action in the 1600s in which the women refused to have sexual relations until the men stopped their warring.

 [iii] The Haudenosaunee nation is a federation of five nations --the Cayuga, the Onondaga, the Oneida, the Seneca, and the Mohawk.

 [iv] The clothes were named “bloomers” after Amelia Bloomer, who promoted the clothing style in her newspaper for women, The Lily.

 [v] The First Wave of feminism in the US is generally understood to have begun in the 1840s with the first Women’s Rights Convention and ending with the ratification of the 19th amendment to the Constitution prohibiting the United States and its various states from denying the right to vote on the basis of sex. The Second Wave is understood to have begun in the 1960s with an older branch of mostly professional women and a younger branch of students and activists who had come of age in the New Left and civil rights movements.

 [vi] Here in the Twin Ports, some of the many organizations that began during that time were the Program to Aid Victims of Sexual Assault (PAVSA), Safe Haven Shelter, the Center Against Sexual and Domestic Abuse (CASDA), the Domestic Abuse Intervention Project (DAIP), Mending the Sacred Hoop, the American Indian Community Housing Organization (AICHO), Women’s Transitional Housing, the Northland Women’s Coffeehouse, Wise Women Radio, Aurora: A Lesbian Organization, Women in Construction, the Building for Women, and the Women’s Studies program at UMD.  For more details, see my Making Waves: Grassroots Feminist Organizations in Duluth and Superior.

 [vii] In 2013, Native women activists and advocates were successful in insuring the inclusion of the historic provision in the Violence Against Women Reauthorization act that would allow Tribes to exercise criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians who commit acts of intimate partner violence. Prior to this, non-Indians could commit such acts with impunity.

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Hope Is Giving Birth in the Face of the Dragon

The image of the baby born under the rubble of the recent earthquake in Syria has been haunting me. So has the image in my mind of her mother, giving birth to her baby while trapped after the building, where she, her husband, and their children were sleeping, collapsed.  The baby’s uncle, who was digging through the debris hoping to reach his brother and family, found the baby alive, her umbilical cord still attached to her mother. He cut the cord and the baby let out a cry.  Tragically, her mother had died after giving birth, as had her father and siblings.

I keep thinking of her mother – of what it must have been like for her to go into labor while being pinned under the rubble of the collapsed building, with not so much as a hand to hold let alone a midwife, medical facilities, pain relief, clean sheets, hot water, and simply the ability to move.  Had she even been able to see or touch her baby before she died?  What were her fears?  What were her hopes? 

In a session on hope during my training to be a hospice volunteer, we went around the circle and each gave our definition of hope.  One person said, “Hope is giving birth in the face of the dragon.”  The reference is to the book of Revelations in the Bible, where it is written of Mary that a  “ . . . dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born.”[i] Despite the threatening circumstances of Jesus’s birth and life, Mary gives birth in the face of the dragon.  I found this reference later in Audre Lorde’s “Man Child,” where she writes of the perilous nature of giving birth and “raising Black children – female and male – in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon.”[ii]  

The dragons abound.  Undoubtedly, the Syrian woman who gave birth in the midst of an earthquake had already given birth to her other children in the face of the dragon of war, as have women living in underground shelters in Ukraine.  Women in Afghanistan and Iran give birth to girls in the face of the dragon of severe gender oppression, while those in Somalia give birth in the face of famine and death. Others, seeking refuge and asylum, birth children while fleeing violence and poverty. African American women in the U.S. give birth facing the dragon of their children being  at high risk of incarceration and gun violence;[iii] as do indigenous women in the U.S. whose girl children are at such high risk of disappearing and being murdered, and whose boy children are at high risk of death by suicide;[iv] as do women in prison, often shackled while giving birth, whose babies are taken from them soon after being born;[v] as do women all over the world whose children face an uncertain future of climate crisis and possible catastrophe.

Every birthing mother faces her own dragon as well, for what Margaret Sanger wrote decades ago -- that each time a woman gives birth, she goes through “the vale of death”[vi] -- still rings true. Thousands of women around the world die in childbirth every year. Maternal mortality rates in the U.S. are among the highest of all the developed countries, [vii] and for African American women in the U.S., those rates are nearly three times those for white women.[viii] Yet the numbers in the United States pale by comparison with those of women in the vast majority of African nations.[ix]  Additionally, a recently published study estimates that the current bans on abortion in the U.S., if extended nationwide, would lead to a 21% increase in the number of pregnancy-related deaths overall and a 33% increase among Black women.

More and more women are choosing not to give birth in the face of these dragons.  Since the Dobbs decision,[x] which makes enforceable the laws in many states prohibiting abortion, even to save the life and health of the mother, more women of child-bearing age are seeking permanent sterilization through tubal ligations.  Others fear the lack of support for families in the U.S.  Unlike nearly every other country in the world, the United States offers no paid parental leave.  Nor does the U.S. provide much support for childcare, supporting families with a measly $500 per year per child, in contrast with Norway, which provides almost $30,000. Other countries fall in between these extremes, most offering well upwards of $10,000 per year per child.[xi] Nor does the U.S. have any provisions for paid sick leave, in comparison with over 145 other countries that do.[xii] Add to these the appalling lack of government-supported health care in the U.S., and choosing to have children in America can become quite precarious, especially for those already on the margins.  In addition, more and more couples are choosing not to give birth in the face of the dragon of climate change, as anxieties rise of what the future of the earth might portend for any child they would choose to bring into the world.

Of course, it is only in the past fifty years or so of effective contraception and evolving reproductive justice that the bearing of children has become more of a choice for women around the world.  Whether chosen or not, whether facing dragons of war or poverty, the collapse of buildings or of the earth itself, the fact remains that the vast majority of women around the world give birth.  About 250 women have given birth just in the time it will have taken you to read this.  And in that moment of bringing new life into the world, each gives the strength of their love, their body, their resilience to affirming life, goodness, possibility, and hope. As I write this, I think as well of feminist composer Margie Adam saying of women, “When we risk new possibilities, we give birth to ourselves.”[xiii]

As evidenced in the thousands upon thousands of goddess figurines found throughout the world, cultures have long honored the strength, resilience, and life-giving powers of pregnant and birthing women.  Yet, in these patriarchal times where, as Simone de Beauvoir pointed out, “superiority has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but to that which kills,”[xiv] our statuary tends more to memorialize men for their valor in war.  It is past time to venerate the valor of birthing women. Whether giving birth to children or to themselves in the face of the patriarchal dragon, in a rewording of the Wisdom of Sirach (44:1), [xv] let us now praise women, who gave birth to us all.

Pre-Columbian goddess figurine - Tlazolteotl

Sanger, Margaret. 1920. “Birth Control — A Parent’s Problem or Woman’s?” from Women and the New Race. In Kolmar, Wendy K. and Frances Bartkowski. 2013. Feminist Theory: A Reader. 4th ed. New York: McGraw Hill: 144-145.

 [i] Rev. 12:4.

[ii] Sister Outsider, 74.

[iii] African American babies are over twice as likely to die in the first year of their lives as white babies. In 2017, blacks represented 12% of the U.S. adult population but 33% of the sentenced prison population. Whites accounted for 64% of adults but 30% of prisoners. Hispanics represented 16% of the adult population, but  accounted for 23% of inmates. Finally, 32% of those killed by gun violence in the US are African American. 

[iv] According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the murder rate is ten times higher than the national average for women living on reservations, and the third leading cause of death for Native women. According to the National Crime Information Center, in 2016, there were 5,712 reports of missing American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls, though the true number is probably higher. In 2020, suicide rates were highest among indigenous youth as compared to other races, and males are four times more likely to die by suicide than females.

[v] Roughly 12,000 pregnant women are incarcerated in the U.S. each year, but only about a dozen states have prison nurseries where babies can stay.  23 states still allow the shackling of women prisoners while laboring and giving birth.  A federal act that would insure against the shackling of imprisoned birthing women did not make it through Congress.  After giving birth, most incarcerated mothers are only allowed  24 hours with their newborn babies who are then either placed with relatives or in foster care.

[vi] Sanger, “Birth Control,” 145.

[vii] In 2018, there were 17 maternal deaths for every 100,000 live births in the U.S., more than double that of most other high-income countries In contrast, the maternal mortality ratio was three per 100,000 or fewer in the Netherlands, Norway, and New Zealand. The disparity is due in large part to the exceedingly low number of midwives proportionate to the number of women giving birth, in comparison to the far higher numbers in other countries.  In the U.S. the ratio is four midwives per thousand births, in comparison to Sweden with 78/1000, Austria with 75/1000, Norway with 65/1000, and similarly throughout the developed world.

[viii] Maternal Mortality Rates in the United States, 2020 (cdc.gov)

[ix] For example, maternal mortality rates in South Sudan, Chad, and Sierra Leone are more than 1100 per 100,000 births, whereas in the US the comparable number is 17. Nevertheless, the U.S. has only the 129th lowest maternal mortality rate out of 184 countries.

[x] Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, No. 19-1392, 597 U.S. (2022), in which the Supreme Court held that the U.S. Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.

[xi] On average in the U.S., parents with two small children spend between 35-40% of their income on childcare.

[xii] Nearly one in three private-sector workers, and 70% of low wage workers, cannot earn one single paid sick day. Nor can they take off work if their child is sick, so many must send their sick children to school and daycare. 

[xiii] Naked Keys,  album cover.

[xiv] The Second Sex,  64.

[xv] The original wording is, “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.”

"A new heart I will give you. . . "

February is “Heart Month.”  Presumably the American Heart Association chose February as the month to raise awareness about cardiovascular health because in February we celebrate Valentine’s Day which we observe by the giving and receiving of hearts of all kinds -- heart-shaped Valentines, candy, jewelry, rocks – symbolic declarations of love, of giving our hearts to one another. Hearts have long been associated with love. When we bring our emotions to the surface, we “wear our hearts on our sleeve.” When we speak our deepest feelings, we “pour our hearts out.” Feelings of tenderness “warm our heart,” and compassion “pulls at our heartstrings.”  When grieving, we feel “heartache,” and loss of love renders us “heartbroken.”  The French word for heart, coeur, associates hearts with courage. We “take heart;” we “lose heart.”  To “hearten” is to encourage. When can engage in a task “wholeheartedly,” “halfheartedly,” or our “heart’s not in it” at all.  We can be “bravehearted,” “heavyhearted,” “lighthearted,” “tenderhearted,” “hardhearted,” or totally “heartless.”  That’s a lot for the heart to carry.

The heart also bears many religious significances from the seat of joy, thankfulness, integrity, and courage, to purity and righteousness:

A glad heart makes a cheerful countenance. – Proverbs 15:13

Create in me a clean heart, O God. — Psalm 51:10

Blessed are the pure in heart.– Matthew 5:8

The list could go on, but the one that hits me the hardest is this --

A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. – Ezekiel 36:26

--  for February also happens to be the month in which I received an actual heart from a far-too-young donor who had died tragically in a plane crash.  Had my heart become stone? What did I need to cut out, let go of, change? What were the spiritual lessons I needed to learn?

I recently discovered another woman’s story of her heart transplant – Lerita Coleman Brown.[i]  The parallels between us are almost too uncanny to be believed.  Within eleven months of each other, we both received a heart transplant at the age of 41.  We have the same blood type and body size. We were both college professors.  After our transplants, we both wrote books about our spiritual reflections on our heart transplants and became spiritual directors. Most striking of all, both of our donors were named Jody/Jodi. 

Of course, our stories also differ in significant ways.  Lerita is black; I am white. She was single and had no children; I was married with a young child. Her donor was about her age; mine was only nine. She waited four days for her heart while I waited almost four years. She had some significant complications post-transplant; my post-transplant journey has been fairly smooth. Nevertheless, the impact of the transplant on our lives, the spiritual wisdom gained is very similar. As we are entering “Heart Month,” it seemed fitting to share a few of those spiritual insights here.

Surrender, Trust: Both of us struggled mightily with the fact that so much of our lives and our respective heart issues -- hers, heart failure; mine, deadly dysrhythmias – were beyond our control, (though I often thought if I could just learn to meditate better I might be able to control my heart rhythm, ignoring the fact that my heart was the size of a basketball and mostly flopped around.) Neither of us wanted to let go of our hearts.  My heart was my constant companion for over forty years, the center of my love and identity.  Now they wanted to cut it out, and then trust that a newly implanted heart of a stranger would start beating after sitting in cold storage for several hours.  And we both dealt with the fear of dying.  As Lerita asked, “Do I have enough trust in God to go through with this?” (1478).

We both needed to learn surrender and trust.  Lerita described this as listening to and trusting the “still small voice of the spirit.”  As she wrote, “ . . . you are going have to LISTEN to the quiet urgings of your spirit that lies deep within your heart. You are going to have to TRUST what it tells you” (1855). Similarly, for me, letting go and trust were a matter of listening to an inner wisdom. The days I listened, when I was open, everything flowed.  In those moments when I surrendered to a deeper knowing — especially those closest to death — I experienced a deep peace.  I realized letting go is not so much a leap of faith as a fall into a deep pool, trusting that the water would buoy me up.  I learned I needed to focus on the faith, rather than the fear; to ride the current of this river of my life, and be held in this deep pool by love.

Patience: “Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes” – the song from Rent recalls those days of waiting.  My lessons in patience came from the waiting – over a thousand days, thirty-five thousand hours, two million minutes. I often felt like I was counting the minutes. Patience was difficult with every day I couldn’t go out and play with my son, with every shock of the implantable defibrillator, with every night of wondering if I would wake to see the morning.  For Lerita, whose heart told her, “You’re going to need plenty of PATIENCE,” (1855) lessons in patience came with weeks and months of a difficult recovery and episodes of rejection. 

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart . . . ,“ counseled the quote from Rilke above my desk.  I learned that patience was also a matter of letting go and trust, as well as of being fully present in the here and now, not the longed-for future. I was reminded of Sisyphus, who day after day rolls his rock up the mountain, only to have it roll back down, and then turns, goes back down, and rolls the rock up again. Patience is being willing to roll the rock up the mountain countless times, in trust.  It is a matter, as Rilke suggested, of living the questions now and, with hope, living into the answer.[ii]

Hope: What is a heart transplant if not hope? In granting the possibility of new life out of death, it is the essence of hope. Yet, hopefulness is also knowing death is imminent and finding a way to live well into that knowledge. The impulse of hope encourages us to go on despite the odds against our endeavor. Hope indeed seems to spring eternal. In my darkest days, something would come along and lift me out.  Hope is a testimony of the human spirit, lifting us up, refusing to refuse us.  This new heart brought hope to me, and I believe that in our going on together, we carry the hopes of my donor’s loved ones as well. 

Joy: My mother’s favorite Bible verse was Psalm 30:5: “Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.”  By its very nature of incapacitating illness and precarity, the period preceding a transplant is a time of weeping and dark night of the soul. Awakening to the dawning of a new heart, a new life brings, as the psalmist says, joy. A new heart allowed me the chance to live wholeheartedly, without hesitation, with total abandon, open to the joy that is the wellspring of being.  In Lerita’s conversations with her former heart, referencing Howard Thurman, her heart asks, “What brings you joy? What makes you come alive?” [iii] The vibrancy that radiates with every new opportunity for that aliveness fills our lives with joy.

Gratitude: It seems to go without saying that the inherent response to a heart transplant is gratitude.  How could anyone be anything but enormously grateful for this gift of life given out of the depths of sorrow and generosity.  We both felt deep gratitude as well for all those who helped us before and after – providing meals, transportation, prayer, care, comfort, and support.  But the greatest gratitude is for gratitude itself.  Both Lerita and I grappled with resentment that our lives had not turned out as planned, for the suffering we experienced and the limits placed on our lives, as well as with envy of those who were able, seemingly so easily, to achieve the dreams we had not been able to realize. 

Gratitude was the antidote.  Living in the fullness of gratitude, we have little room for envy or resentment.   In her conversations with her new heart, Lerita learned that her new heart’s name was “Grace.”  It is fitting. Gratitude, gracias, graci, grace.  To live with thanks is to live in grace, to live graciously -- with kindness and compassion toward one’s own and other’s frailties, and with awareness of the abundance of life’s blessings. 

Metanoia: But what of the anger that arises from sexism and racism -- from being treated with disrespect and discrimination simply for the color of one’s skin or for living in a female body? As Lerita’s heart counseled her, the energy of anger, when stored as resentment, only hurts yourself. Instead, put the energy to good use -- set boundaries, create, resist. As Audre Lorde wrote, “Anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act. .  .” (127). Refuse to be denigrated, but also refuse to turn that anger on others.  Let others know what is acceptable and what is not, and then treat them with mercy and a compassion made possible by metanoia — a spiritual change of heart.

Spending days and weeks in the University hospital clinics, I was struck by how artificial and arbitrary are the ways we divide ourselves from each other.  Everywhere I looked --infants and elders; female, male, trans; wearing crosses, hijabs, stars of David, pentacles; on crutches, in wheelchairs, and able-bodied; the many hues of black and brown; the tongues of many nations – Hmong, Somali, English, Spanish, Arabic – all of us waiting for labs, for test results, for our fates to be determined. Waiting in chairs, our common humanity is revealed.

“We share a common human nature,” wrote Sam Keen. “The 50 percent of the human race I cast into the category of aliens are fellow humans who, like myself, are faulted, filled with contradictory impulses of love and hate, generosity, and a blind will to survive . . . “ (150). To experience metanoia requires us to recognize that all the qualities of humanity – love, compassion, kindness, hatred, evil, envy fear, violence – are in ourselves as much as anyone else. Accepting “the fullness of our humanity,” wrote bell hooks, “ . . .  allows us to recognize the humanity of others” (198). “Metanoia,” Keen continued, “brings the enemy within the circle of co-promising, conversation, and compassion” (150). As Lerita put it so well, “I finally understand that everyone who comes to the earth is here to heal, everyone. A homeless person, a king, or a wall street broker – we are all spiritual beings who are finding our way back home to God.  I hold more compassion for people, no matter who they are. . .”  (3010). 

One need not go through a literal change of heart to experience metanoia.  It is possible for all of us, all the time. We may struggle against it, hang on to our grievances and divisions, vilify our enemies, but as Lerita said, “Everyone is just trying to figure it out” (3010).

Love:  The central heart wisdom for both Lerita and myself is the importance of love. As Lerita’s new heart spoke to her: “Love is the ultimate, the true emotion of the heart. . . . Love helps you understand that you are part of an interconnected web of relationships; it is designed to help you remember that everyone is connected. Love and connection are the universal message” (2363). In Brian Swimme’s The Universe Is a Green Dragon, the youth asks the teacher what our fullest destiny is, to which the teacher responds, “to become love in human form” (40). This was the lesson I learned when I first faced my mortality in my early twenties, and again with the transplant.  I often pondered what life was all about, and the only thing that made sense to me was love – our destiny – to become love in human form. 

So, as it turns out, the association of the heart with love is appropriate after all.  To become love is the enduring wisdom of the heart.

 Sources

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

Brown, Lerita Coleman. 2019. When the Heart Speaks, Listen: Discovering Inner Wisdom. Digital edition.

hooks, bell. 2013.Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge.

Keen, Sam. 1983. The Passionate Life: Stages of Loving. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

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

Rilke, Rainer Maria. 1954. Letters to a Young Poet. Revised Ed. Norton, M.D. Herter, Trans. New York: W.W. Norton.

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

[i] When the Heart Speaks, Listen: Discovering Inner Wisdom.

[ii] The full Rilke quote is: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves . . . 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.” Letters to a Young Poet, 35.

[iii] Dr. Brown has since written a book about Howard Thurman, What Makes You Come Alive: A Spiritual Walk with Howard Thurman, and conducts retreats, teaches, and has a podcast helping people to access peace and joy in their hearts. Find out more at Lerita Coleman Brown.