Emergence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pink and yellow ladyslippers will soon follow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Sources

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

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

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

 

Bibliophilia

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

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

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

Nazi students burning books in 1933

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Durga Rising: Feminism as Fierce Compassion

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

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

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

Hindu goddess Durga

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Walking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Labyrinth

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

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

The turnstile

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

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

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

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

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

Ben Lomond

Ben Lomond

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

Ben Lomond

 Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vastness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 




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

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

Becoming Grandma

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

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

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

Grandma

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

Nana

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

My mom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

DeJong, Mary. “Wild Winter.” Waymarkers.

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

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

Breath

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

“Breath.” June 11, 2021. Radiolab.org

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

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

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

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

Thomsen, Sara. 2003. “By Breath.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remembering Feminism's Indigenous Roots

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

— Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Hope Is Giving Birth in the Face of the Dragon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pre-Columbian goddess figurine - Tlazolteotl

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

 [i] Rev. 12:4.

[ii] Sister Outsider, 74.

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

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

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

[vi] Sanger, “Birth Control,” 145.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[xiii] Naked Keys,  album cover.

[xiv] The Second Sex,  64.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[ii] The full Rilke quote is: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves . . . the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” Letters to a Young Poet, 35.

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

Seeds of Hope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

27 Organizations Working to Conserve Seed Biodiversity – Food Tank

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[iii] Shiva, Stolen Harvest, 79.

[iv] 447 US 303

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

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

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

[viii]  Shiva, Biopiracy, 79.

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

[x] Shiva, Stolen Harvest, 80.

[xi] Krause.

[xii] LaDuke, 175.

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

[xiv] Mn Statute 21.80-21.92.

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

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

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

[xviii] Inciting Joy, 36-37.

Distracted by Beauty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May the beauty we love become what we do.

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

-          Rumi

 Sources

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

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

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

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

[i] tract - Wiktionary

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

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

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

 

 

Joy to the World!

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

Trigger

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

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

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

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

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

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

But it is Gay’s second question – what does joy incite? – that is the more provocative.  Incite – to provoke, stir up, arouse – as in, to incite revolution. Gay answers his own question: “My hunch is that joy is an ember for or precursor to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity.  . . . My hunch is that joy, emerging from our common sorrow – might draw us together.  It might depolarize us and de-atomize us enough that we can consider what, in common, we love.  . . .” (9). Audre Lorde similarly wrote, “The sharing of joy . . . forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.” (56)  Consider for a moment the creative potential, or as Gay says, the “transgressive” possibilities this lessening the threat of difference between us, the depolarization of us, the love between us could bring?  It could up-end the power of those who profit from this polarization and enmity, inviting the subversive possibilities of the “unboundaried solidarity” of being on each other’s side vis à vis the capitalist patriarchy, creating just and right relations with each other and the earth.  Joy incites an uprising of the heart.

In an interview on CNN, Gay related that as he had become more aware of the ways that institutions and structures have been designed to “enforce destitution,” his questioning of that brought him to recognize the potential of radical joy to counter these systems. As Lorde wrote: “That deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within that knowledge that such satisfaction is possible. . . . Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of” (57).  Such joy could empower us to demand of our relationships, our work, our worship, our institutions, and our lives, that they be fulfilling of our deepest purposes, soul-enhancing avenues of self-expression, self-determination, and meaning.[i] Joy incites transformational change.

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

♪And heaven and nature sing!♪

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blizzard!

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

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

Halloween Blizzard 1991

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

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

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

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

 Source

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

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

The Ever-Changing Divine

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Venus of Willdendorf

Hildegard of Bingen’s Illumination

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

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

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

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

Black Madonna of Czestochowska

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watershed Moments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The high falls on the Amity in Lester Park.

References

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

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

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

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

Why Write?

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

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

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

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

The people I love the best

jump into work head first. . . .  

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

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task. . . . 

The pitcher cries for water to carry

And a person for work that is real. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remembering The Burning Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[iv] Thea Jensen, in The Burning Times.

[v] Barstow, Witchcraze.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Breathtaking

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

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

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

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

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

Lake of the Clouds, Porcupine Mountains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

In Memoriam: Donna Howard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[viii] From Barb Kass, “Remembrance.”

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