Flashback*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[v] My Grandmother’s Hands, 7.

[vi] The Rebel, 22, emphasis mine.

Earth Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copenhill

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

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

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

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

 

[i] Perfluoroalkyl substances.

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

[iii] Winona’s Hemp & Heritage Farm.

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

[v] Braiding Sweetgrass, 108.

On Listening

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 [i] Ueland, 205.

[ii] Uttal, 317 & 319.

[iii] Quoted in Tippett, 130.

[iv] Guenther, 145.

[v] Zaretsky.

[vi] Ueland, 205.

[vii] Rich, 5.

[viii] Kimmerer, 49.

[ix] Nouwen, 58.

Becoming Grandma: One Year Later

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources Quoted

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

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

 

 

 

 

Neyaashi*

-- *meaning “long, narrow point”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[vi] Shiva, Earth Democracy, 35.

[vii] Ibid., 161.

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

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

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

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

[xii] Ibid.

On Friendship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

. . .

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

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

 Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Carry Your Heart

I carry your heart with me (I carry it in

my heart) I am never without it (anywhere)

I go you go. . .

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

-    e.e. cummings

 

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

 

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

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

No other road no other way
No day but today

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings . . .

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

Sources

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

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

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

Larson, Jonathon. 1996. Rent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kairos Time Redux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

We Were Told Not to Eat the Snow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

……..

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

Coldwater Creek radioactive waste cleanup tops $400M | STLPR    

Environmental Consequences - Nuclear Museum

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

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

Hanford Site | History, Cleanup, & Facts | Britannica

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

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

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

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

Marshall Islands – Nuclear Museum

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

Nevada Test Site – Nuclear Museum

Nevada Test Site Downwinders - Nuclear Museum

Nuclear Weapons by Country 2024 (worldpopulationreview.com)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Nuclear Museum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[ii] Quoted in Blume, 172.

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

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

[v] Quoted in Southard.

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

[vii] Blume, 121.

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

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

[x] Solnit, 195.

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

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

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

[xiv] Camus, 110.

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

[xv] Rich, 3.

Kairos Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Sources

DeJong, Mary. “Wild Autumn.” Waymarkers.

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

 

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.