Category: Uncategorized

The Weaver of Words

 

     The blue curtains are still half closed as to not disturb the cobweb that had been built the night before. She is thankful the sun had glistened off its threads in such a way that it had caught her eyes before jerking the curtain wide open to let in the morning. She moves her chair slightly so she can watch the web shiver in the sunlight as she drinks her coffee. Her kitchen, small, bright from that sunlight coming through the window, is free of clutter. It reflects her simplicity: room for only two at the table, no cute containers on the counters, only a blender for smoothies. She'd long ago put away the microwave and other contraptions of modern cooking. 
     With one finger, she moves the vagabonding strands of long brown hair to lodge behind her ear. Her face holds the quiet, reflected in a softness that is only gently etched by time that has worked creases into the corners of her eyes. Her mouth is pulled down slightly at its corners as gravity schlepps its ever-gentle pull on her aging skin. Mornings of sunshine and light, like this morning, help balance the reflections dwelling in the shadows.
     A writer, a weaver of words, a sleuth of storylines, her creations happen in the space of secluded rooms, wombs into which she descends where most life first thinks itself into existence. Far from tenebrous but necessarily holding the calm that the darkness of night embraces, her life is lived in the seclusion necessary to create, that place in which thoughts reside in quiet. Every morning, she has settled into the silence of her small house. Never any music played nor news of the world pushed into its clean energy. She fills with the silence, content, like a comfort food meal. She fills the silence with words. 
     She looks at the paper on which she's written a title, "Aweigh of Life - A Memoir and Travel Tales of Seven Years in the South Pacific," and she begins to write.

“I was never tethered tightly to my family body, nor was I brought close in for nurturing and protection. I felt I was not an essential thing to protect. As a young child, I was tied by a thin string which broke again and again. I tugged hard so they’d know my strength, and they’d see my accomplishments. “Am I good enough now?” Seeing my demands not as a need for recognition but as rebellion, they tied thicker ropes with stronger knots made of stricter rules. But they too frayed quickly, eaten away by the acid anger of an unhappy family. I drifted from home because there was nothing to hold me, and when I was far enough away, I pulled the anchor up completely and stowed it deep inside to put down only if or when I found safe harbor.

“Anchor aweigh, I touched that exhilarating freedom of deep waters. I ceased to look for safe harbor. I sought out the storms and mountains, any challenge that proved that I could survive without “them,” an ever-broadening pronoun. I changed course, changed boats – just as tides turned and winds shifted – like moods, changing hour by hour, day by day, leaving flotsam floating on receding horizons, never thinking that they would be the pieces I’d gather up one day to find my way home and the reason I left.”

     That's how it began several years before. Now remembering the genesis of that book, she ponders the story behind the story. A new cobweb hangs in her window. She herself feels suspended, twisting on woven threads, a coarse, emotionally tactile tatted fabric; holes left between tight stitches. She's reweaving something, giving it form, finding the warp and filling in the weft of a generational backstory.
     But her sacred world is interrupted by her cell phone ring, playing Ripple. She allows it to reach the beginning lyrics, "If my words did glow, with the gold of sunshine, and my tunes were played on a harp unsung....." before answering, "Hello, this is Edie."      
     She hangs up the phone and takes another sip of her coffee, gazing out the window. She'd almost forgotten that she had committed to a weekend of women who, for 30 years, have gathered together once a year at the summer's end. She is being reminded to bring a cooler of ice. Her preference is to stay here and keep writing. Each year she is nudged from her cocoon, a call to shift gears and join the Tawanda Girls for another "crazy weekend." Sometimes she commits, though this year she wishes she hadn't. 
     She fears letting loose her muse to roam elsewhere, to gather loose threads in the wind and wander afar. Will the weaver return?  Will this sacred spell be broken? Will the frivolity of the Tawanda women destroy the thaumaturgy created in this moment? Will the muse return to fill the empty pages between the bookends? 
     Time eases the sun away from her window. She resolves to have faith. Her coffee is cold, but she pours the last into her cup, adds the last of her half and half, and then she gathers up her things and walks out the door.

 

What brings me joy?

I find my deepest joy in moments of deep meditation where I feel I am the joy; that the Everything and I are shimmering in a place where there are no thoughts, no judgments, no comparisons. It’s a giant emptiness filled with a quiet joy.

In the world where all my senses perceive its sights and sounds and textures, it’s found in baby’s smiles and puppy breath. I touch it in sunsets on mountain tops and exquisite desert sunrises. It’s in the exhale of leaves touched so lightly by the soughing of a breeze. Great joy is found on a high cliff overlooking the endless ocean. It’s carried on the call of an eagle or raven or in sighting a buck standing majestic in my field.

Nature and all things natural bring me joy, even great storms.

The coming together of people in a crisis, working together, sharing and caring, brings me great joy in the moment, as does the returning to the silence and solitude of my home to enjoy a good book and contemplation.

Joy is fleeting and yet it’s ever present and everywhere.  I need only pause to allow it to fill me.

My earliest memory

“They say” that people don’t remember things before the age of five, but this not true for me. My memories are embedded in the places I’ve lived, which have been many. Hence, my earliest memories put me in the summertime on the edges of a tributary of the Patapsco River, somewhere outside of Baltimore where my parents had a cottage, a small place on post and pilings with brownish asphalt shingles. There was a hand pump in the kitchen for water and a latrine across a narrow road behind the cottage, filled with cobwebs and all things scary, in line with others’ latrines.

I was two and a half years old, and “the memory” is actually several snapshots of that place, a spanning and blending such that I’ll never know which memory came first. One memory is, at that cottage, I shared a bedroom with my two brothers. In it there were three iron army cots with squeaking springs under the thin mattresses. We had gone to a Ben Franklin’s one day, and I had stolen a chocolate bar and had climbed under my army cot to eat it. My brother, a year and a half older, discovered me eating that bar of chocolate and when I wouldn’t share with him, he tattled to my mother who then angrily dragged me out from under that bed, piled me into the family car and drove me back to that store to confess I’d stolen that nickel candy.

Within that same place, at that same cottage, are my parents sitting in lawn chairs by the water’s edge drinking martinis with their next-door neighbors. Jack was one of my father’s colleagues at John Hopkins. His wife, Olive, typed Braille books. I have a swirl of memories being at their small cottage next door to ours, the most poignant being touching the pages that Olive had typed, feeling the raised bumps while Olive explained that some people could not see and they read books with their fingers. I felt her watching my wonder as she allowed my exploration of this strange typewriter, during which time Olive would be rolling her daily quota of cigarettes that she’d put in a shiny brass case.

There was a swing set there at the cottage, and I regularly shinnied up the pole to view the world from on high.  I have a clear snapshot of being up that pole one day, overlooking my parents and Jack and Olive as they smoked cigarettes and sipped on martinis. When I descended the pole, I went to my mother’s chair and, apparently thirsty, I reached for her dry martini and took a large gulp as if it was water. I remember the four adults watching me, thinking I would spit it out. Instead, I remember really liking that martini.  Then I ate the olive.

I know those memories are from the age of two-and-a-half, because the summer when I was three and a half we moved to the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I drove in the front seat with my father to the new house — an old farmhouse on 26 acres — in our station wagon loaded with our clothes and smaller possessions. As I exited the car, I slammed the car door completely shut on my right thumb. As I stood screaming, my father rounded the car to spank me for screaming only to discover, upon opening the door, that my thumb was almost completely severed. My father reached into the car and grabbed, of all things, my best pair of socks, my only pair of socks that had embroidered flowers on its edges, to wrap my thumb together and rush me to the hospital where they reattached my thumb. For that whole long, hot, humid summer, with my right thumb wrapped in thick gauze, with creeks and fields and woods to explore, my life was severely restricted so as to allow my thumb to heal.  I remember learning to read that summer.

My brother is a year and a half older than me, and we have talked about those times seventy years ago, and though of course he doesn’t have my specific memories, he too has memories embedded in those places which we have shared to reinforce what would otherwise be considered a daydream.

Bravery

I am no more brave than the steadiness of a great tree leaning into the brutish force of hurricane winds. I am no more brave than a boat with reefed sails awash with cresting waves. I am no more brave than a feather on the wings of a breeze to be blown one knows not where. I am no more brave than the leaves that fall from a tree at the end of a dry summer to lay as carpet under the weight of a herd of elk. I am no more brave than a bedouin laying beneath the pin-holed sky of an immense night in the cooling sands of the endless desert.

I am no more brave than a baby that makes the journey from its confined watery world into the air – for it is not this mind and body that produces the act of bravery but the very detachment from that which we’ve conjured necessary to survive. I am brave when I release my mind and the ego I of my actions to dwell, instead, in the space of spirit within.

Having edged into the realm of Elder, looking back at those moments where action was needed for survival of myself or another, where another might have witnessed my actions as bravery, I now know the look and feel of the place-that’s-noplace into which I would slip where bravery is given form, ever so briefly. Like all things of spirit, the room of bravery cannot be explained but through metaphors.

Though it is nothing physical, I see that source hover before me as a horizon-wide, giant cube that is solid and yet I can enter into it; it has no doors or windows but I can move into its space to rest within. It’s a within-ness devoid of substance and yet it is a completeness in itself from which I cannot separate. In this pure space there are no thoughts and without thoughts there is no fear. Without fear, without constrictions, bravery is easily tapped into, like an endless stream of energy from which I can draw as needed; not unlike the endlessness of love, bravery dwells in this space beyond mind and body, always available to fuel a necessary action. Bravery is complete surrender to the dwelling place of spirit.

 

GET LOUD – Because right now, we are NOT a great nation

I didn’t need Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue to write this; I did need to hear it to give myself permission to publish it, to get loud about what I feel. I felt I needed to rein myself in, knowing that when I get emotionally distraught my words can feel destructive, even to me; they’re angry rants, instead of finding the passages in the darkness where a little light might shine at just the right angle where even the blindest person perceives it and turns towards it and listens to the truth that I believe in my heart must exist in every person out there, no matter their political persuasion.  It is difficult to find hope for our society when children continue to be murdered.  So the least I can do is get loud.

I’ll start with the common sense things I KNOW.

If I don’t wear a seatbelt I will be fined, even though the only person it hurts is me if I don’t wear it.

If I even  touch my cell phone when driving, I can be fined and even imprisoned.

Every driver in this country must have a license to drive a car and will be fined and possibly jailed if they fail to abide that law. And they must renew it regularly.

Every driver must take a test and prove they understand the laws and rules governing their legal right to operate a vehicle on public roads.

Drivers can be fined and lose their licenses and/or be jailed for violations that endanger other members of society.

Every car must have insurance to protect people and property from a car’s inherent ability to kill and maim (yes, it’s not the car that kills; it’s the driver, right?)

Every car must be licensed. And, in most states cars are required to pass safety checks to insure the car is not handicapped (i.e., insanely unsafe) to drive safely on the road.

Those things I know.

At the very least, these same things should apply to gun ownership. 

Background checks for the mentally ill?  It seems to me that in America, we are in a situation where the fox is guarding the hen house.  Why have we come to accept that someone who is obsessed with a sense of fear that others might attack and/or kill them (paranoid delusions), and hence feel the need to arm themselves with weapons of war and other semi-automatic weapons are sane? Why have we accepted the idea that a person with a Personality Disorder of Excessive Power Strivings  is also sane?  I propose that these people, constituting a growing number of people in our society, are in fact mentally ill, and they themselves should not be allowed to own guns.  In other words, the simple “background checks” is not going to weed out 95% of the mentally ill people allowed to purchase and carry weapons of killing.

Negligent homicide.  It seems to me that people in government positions that support fewer gun laws are in fact complicit in murders occurring within their jurisdictions. Knowing our laws, and the irony that they control those guns and gun laws, it’s unlikely they will be charged with such crimes.  But voters do have the power to remove them from office and replace them with those who will not prostitute themselves to the NRA (or other corporate institutions that cause harm in our society).

Education not prison.  I propose that “freedom” is not turning our schools into prisons with armed guards and only one door. But education might avoid such prisons. Anyone who owns a gun should  undergo an intensive educational program not just on safe gun handling but an extensive, hours-long education on the evolution of our society’s gun culture, anger-management screening, intensive victims’ panel discussions, and testing on those subjects as well as gun safety.  Yearly. The problem is a cultural one which needs to be addressed with education, not more guns or prison walls for our children.

Registry and insurance. Like a vehicle, every gun needs to be registered.  Further, no ammunition can be sold to any individual without proof of a registered weapon, and the amount of ammunition and types of ammunition will go into a monitored data base, just like a driver’s record is kept in a data base. Each year, a gun owner must present his gun in person to a designated office, to prove they are still in possession of it. Like automobile insurance, which varies with the make, model, year, and value of a car as well as where that car is primarily driven, a gun owner needs to pay an insurance premium commensurate with the type of gun. For example, their premium would be $1,000 a year for each AR-15; $500 a year for a semi-automatic pistol; $50 a year for a .22 rifle. For the right to own a gun and prove they are being responsible gun owners, their home must be open for inspection to prove that their weapons of murder are locked in safe boxes, and that they have a license and insurance to own it. If they do not prove yearly ownership, and cannot show proof of sale, they will be fined and/or put in prison. Just like uninsured, unlicensed reckless drivers.

But our societal problems are deeper than just gun control.

We need to have  a Constitutional Convention to bring the Constitution into the 21st Century and correct its obsolescence, because all these representatives who swear to uphold the Constitution are in fact continuing a status quo that is not in line with modern times.

The 2nd Amendment was written because at that time, there was no government militia. There was no army. If attacked, they wanted the ability of citizens to form a military to protect the country.  Further, the southern states wanted a militia so they could protect themselves against a slave rebellion and/or track down slaves that ran away.

There is no longer a need for individuals to form a militia to “secure a free state”; we have a monstrous military complex in place protecting us against foreign attackers for which our tax dollars contribute a disproportionately huge amount.  The 2nd Amendment is obsolete in that regard. Though racism is not dead, slavery is, and there is no need to hunt down and re-imprison those human beings who made the slave owner rich and and powerful.

A new look at speech. News took days if not weeks to be disseminated.  Now, with our instant social media, in seconds, lies and hate speech are disseminated that incite crimes of hate and insurrection, all of which seem to be leading to anarchy and fascism and a breakdown of the very social mores our Constitution was meant to protect against. We are in dangerous times when there are more weapons than citizens — weapons that can shoot not one bullet every two minutes but hundreds in seconds —  while being fueled with lies, disinformation, and hate.

I propose the Electoral College needs to be excised from the Constitution because it perpetuates a multitude of continuing injustices in our society. It was installed for purely racist reasons: Before the South would join the union, slave owners insisted that 3/5th of their slaves constitute one vote in elections. A slave owner with 100 slaves would be allowed 60 votes, and the Electoral College was established to favor those white male slave owners.

We no longer have slaves. There is absolutely no bias to anybody to have one person, one vote. The number of electoral votes is equal to the number of members of Congress: senators and congressmen.  But there is incredible bias when a slight majority of delegates in a state can vote against the will of the majority of the people, hence instilling a president who did not win the popular vote, and who does not represent the will of the people.  Instead, the archaic and discriminatory Electoral College continues to represent the interests of a smaller group of the wealthiest people with their own personal interests, biases and prejudices, their own ignorance, and influenced by the controlling corporations and monied individuals, who do not have the interest of the average American citizen in mind.

The Constitution is obsolete because, to this day, women do not have constitutional equal rights.

We need a constitutional convention to correct these deep societal and cultural wrongs that exist in the Constitution. It was a document created by wealthy male landowners in a time so different than ours is today.  We need a governing document that aligns with the wiser and more just society that the majority of the people of the United States aspire to have.  We are wiser than our “founding fathers,” and the world is a different place.  Until then…

We are not a great nation when there are more guns than citizens and our government allows their free use to murder children, women, people of color (something perpetrated by continuing to have the Electoral College in place).

We are not a great nation when we have institutionalized racism and sexism and gender discrimination and the white male conservative majority prevents correcting these wrongs so they can maintain the status quo (something perpetrated by continuing to have the Electoral College in place).

We are not a great nation when women, who have brought forth every one of us from their wombs — through a process called labor, a labor no man could endure — do not have the equal rights of their male counterparts in our society, and whose right to make decisions about their bodies is taken from them by those same men who hold power over them (something perpetrated by continuing to have the Electoral College in place).

We are not a great nation when our government officials are nothing more than prostitutes to corporate lobbyists, an ill-disguised form of deep-pocketed corruption in our system of governance (something perpetrated by continuing to have the Electoral College in place).

We are not a great nation when one body of Congress prevents the legitimate selection of a Supreme Court Justice in order to pack a court that is no longer an independent overseer of the laws and no longer that third arm of our democracy, but are mere puppets of corporate interests and prostituted legislators.

We are not a great nation when our representatives in Congress “can’t figure out why people are gunning down children” and shoppers and movie goers daily in our country (think a little harder, Lindsey) (perpetuated by ignorance and their chosen career as prostitutes).

We are not a great nation when we our freedom of speech and our right to read and educate ourselves is being curtailed by a few power-hungry, corrupt individuals who feel threatened by those who might hear the truth and learn of a different point of view than their biased, bigoted, discriminatory proselytizing.

We are not a great nation when we put billionaires’ interests ahead of the poorest and most needy.

We are not a great nation when we do not provide paid maternity leave but instead put capitalistic interests ahead of the ability to nurture our children for their formative years so that — just maybe? — they won’t feel abandoned and unloved and decide they will deal with their hurt by killing others. We are not a great nation when we refuse to substitute or subsidize free day care for our children in a nurturing environment but instead have X-Box shoot-em-up videos babysit latchkey children after school (something perpetrated by continuing to have the Electoral College in place).

We are not a great nation that puts the GDP over the existential environmental degradation from which we are less than three years away from passing the point of no return, and we are not a great nation when the almighty dollar is greater than our trust in God (something perpetrated by continuing to have the Electoral College in place).

We are not a great nation if we are hypocrites.

But we are fucked ….. if we can’t immediately address the gun laws and the inequality, and the lies, and the corporate corruption, and all the other problems that this not-great country suffers from.

BUT, we can be a great nation if we put our trust in God, in whatever way one believes in that invisible force that breathes us into life, that hums us with love when we’re quiet enough to shut out all the bullshit of the gun-totin’, woman-hatin’, racist, corrupt politicians and those who support them.

We can be a great nation when we put the love of our children ahead of the almighty dollar.

We can be a great nation when we stand up to the corporate interests of the NRA (and other greedy corporations) and renounce the culture of male supremacy, bias, fear and other power-hungry people.

We will be a great society when we choose to melt the fucking guns down with which we will build a monstrous monument to peace and love with equality and social justice for all.

So get LOUD.

Get LOUD and get out and VOTE.

Vote the hypocritical murderers, political prostitutes, conspiracy nutcases, wimps and liars out of office.

Embrace the human values we all aspire to:  equality, peace, love, inclusiveness because otherwise, it will be Ted Cruz’s world of Texas bacon: One door with a couple paranoid power-crazed jailers who make the decisions as to who gets in or out.

GET LOUD

 

Nature as it is.

Nature is my peace. It is my balance. It is where I live in a quiet harmony within myself. It is where there is no judgment as to good or bad, evil or the opposite. It is.

It has a voice that plays on a vibration beyond my eyes or ears, and yet, like Spirit in man, it only has its clothing, its dresses and shoes and hairstyles, in which to express itself. So its leaves dance with the wind, allowing itself to be caressed, rubbed against. It’s sensual in that. And then, as a storm rolls in, the wind shakes the leaves, branches shudder, like an orgasm, and then there’s calm again.

Nature has a secret world deep in its soil that only now science is getting to know, but I knew some of it as a child, playing in the dirt. I was lucky to live in the country until I was ten. And even afterwards, it was nature to which I flew — ran to — for my personal health. As a teenager in Santa Barbara, the worst of years, my best friend had two horses. We lived in the foothills, and every day after school we took her horses up higher into the mountains along trails, horses struggling with their footing, rocks slipping. We’d find streams, mottled with sunshine and shade, where we could listen to that voice as expressed by Nature, the rippling of water across the rocks as it rubbed against river banks. A symphony of sounds.

I often feel the problem of the world is that people live in concrete jungles. They don’t touch nature; they are not one with it. I live in a small 27-foot van on acreage at  the dead end of a road; it’s dark inside that van, and inside of that darkness my thoughts in-dwell, too often finding criticism — of mankind mostly. But I never criticize or judge nature. I love its hurricanes. I love that its voice, Mother’s voice, is speaking up in a voice that humans, who can’t control it, feel is destructive: a voice of tornadoes and hurricanes and fires and floods and ravaging ways where Mother is reprimanding those who have trod on her, violated her; who refused to walk with her, or speak with her, commune with her, to help heal with her or let her heal them.

Yes, it’s all so-called destructive, and yet it’s not. It’s nature doing what nature does. And mankind screaming that it can’t control what nature does. I laugh. I think good on,you, Mother, for finally spanking your “last thought,” those children of humankind that evolved out of your simplest thoughts: the amoebas and bacterias, the globs that grew into more diverse forms. I think, okay, you’re a truly loving mother to try to clean up the mess that those errant children made.

Yes, I could well be subject of your wrath some day. I could be in the path of that tornado or fire. But in my simplicity, I don’t walk in high heels; I don’t wear the tight skirts and restricting shirts that prevent my free movement. I don’t live in concrete jungles where nothing can survive. I try to dress more in harmony and to be able to walk in your beauty down your paths or, if need be, flee your wrath. If you take me down, I also accept that that’s part of nature; it’s part of my nature that I was born, get sick, and I will die.

Sometimes I think you, Mother, would appreciate me dying soon so there’s fewer of us on this earth so that maybe, maybe some of your more precious children — all the plants and animals — have a chance to survive. But for now, you let me rock in your arms, daily. I hold your ethereal essence as you hold me in your physical form. I watch you rain and give water to all around me — sometimes too much here. I watch the ants and bees and fungi and mosquitos and beetles and all your other creations do what they do. I watch your dance across the grass outside my window, and I watch the deer come almost to my door, which I can see only through the little rear windows of my van, which is, as is your right,  getting covered with moss and pollen now. I’ll let you breathe me as you are my breath.

All the history I did not know….

I promised myself, when I decided to start blogging again, that I wouldn’t get “political.” But sometimes it’s just too darn hard to keep my mouth shut.

I didn’t like history or social studies in high school. I don’t remember it being a deep discussion of ideas or philosophies but instead a process of memorizing pages and pages of events in history: the main characters, the main event, and the date, as in, 1620 the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock; in 1492, Columbus “discovered” America (with, of course, no education as to his murdering and decimation and enslavement of a whole population of peoples who definitely didn’t need discovering to begin with); pages of lines of similar history to be memorized. I remembered 1492 — because it had a rhyme attached to it. I remembered 1620, possibly because my maternal grandparents’ generations were early settlers of Massachusetts (a great, great, great — possibly greater great-grandfather being the first president of Harvard College in 1690). And of course everyone of my generation knew December 7, 1941, which had only occurred a brief 25 years previous to my high school history lessons.

Every line to be memorized was an event of war and domination. But the truth? At least in high school, we weren’t taught that the white man committed genocide upon the First Nations people of what is now the United States. Nobody taught me that the white male society of Britain shipped opium to the Chinese and addicted a whole nation just to equalize their huge trade deficits from their own insatiable appetite for tea. It was simply one-line facts of white male society’s domination over the African continent or South America or India or the conquest of some other empire. They were facts we were to memorize and accept.

Nobody answered my teenage question, “Why did I need to memorize these one-line statements of mankind’s history, most of which reflected wars and conquests?” Oh, that’s right:  it was necessary to memorize these facts so that history would not be repeated. Huh? I might have been interested if I was actually taught the story behind His-Story in high school. I might have become an activist if I was taught that the United States is the only developed country in the world that does not guarantee equal rights for women in its constitution — even to this day! Though all provisions have been met ratifying what would be the 28th Amendment codifying the Equal Rights Act (ERA), codifying women’s equal rights, as I understand its status, it has yet to be certified by the archivist that would embody it forever in our Constitution!! I urge the reader to read Her-Story here. https://msmagazine.com/2022/01/27/equal-rights-amendment-resolution-us-house-28th-amendment-constitution/

I wasn’t taught history or the reasons I should be interested in history, and quite frankly, stuffing facts in my head bored me. Instead, for multiple reasons, one of which was an innate sense of wanderlust in my soul, I found myself sailing the South Pacific throughout the Seventies, five years after high school. I was in the South Pacific, without radio, without newspapers, without knowledge of the world “out there” for seven years.

I was overseas when abortion finally became legal in the United States, though I didn’t know that. I only knew that it was illegal when I went to Mexico (across a border that was still free and open) with my boyfriend seven years earlier (my boyfriend’s father, thankfully, having made the arrangements, of which my parents, now long dead, never knew). I was overseas, living in a thatched hut, subsistence farming, in New Zealand in January of 1973 when, I learned many years later, the American War in Vietnam ended. I was somewhere near the Marquesas or Tahiti when burglars broke into the Democratic Headquarters. I was somewhere near Walpole Island, in the middle of nowhere, when Nixon resigned after Woodward and Bernstein, through a free press, revealed his, and the republican party’s, role in the attempt to corrupt the democratic process. I didn’t even know what “Watergate” was until I saw a movie called All the President’s Men years later. I was somewhere in Australia, the home of Germaine Greer, when I heard this thing called the Women’s Liberation Movement. I didn’t give it much attention because, after all, I was sailing in the South Pacific, free, doing what I wanted to do. Weren’t Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best just childhood fairy tales like Peter Pan, nothing to pay heed to? Women weren’t really like that, were they?

Now I’m bombarded with news. I listen. I absorb it. I get upset. I research what I hear, checking the information. I get horrified when, during Trump’s campaign, I see a woman on national TV grab her own crotch and proudly say, “He can grab my pussy any time he wants.” I feel horrified and helpless when an American congressperson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, proclaims “women are the weaker sex” and that “you belong to your husband.”

All things end, all things change. That’s the nature of things. The misogyny in America will end.  My hope is it ends today, this election term. My hope is that the change that comes is for more equality, not less equality, for more compassion and kindness and love before more hatred and darkness. My hope is it ends before my granddaughters are ordered to wear the handmaid’s robes.

If time passes before my next post, it’s because I’m taking a long walk in nature and looking for its goodness and beauty. But today, because I’ve chosen to live in this society and no longer in a thatched hut cut off from the world, because I see these continued and mounting threats against women’s rights as well as the continued discrimination against people of color:  Sometimes a woman has to speak out against these continued injustices.

Or then again, maybe I’ll leave again and fly to Midway and take care of the albatross.  Who knows (I sure don’t.)

Mothers’ Day

Heather Cox Richardson is an historian and professor at Boston College.  If you’re not aware of her, she posts informative daily blogs on current and past history.  On this mothers’ day, as we witness the mindless brutality of the war in Ukraine, and other places, as well as assaults on women’s rights and human rights, she reminds us that the beginning of Mothers’ Day originated from the cry of women who are left to carry on, work the fields, and work in the industries, while rearing their children and tending the wounded, all while their sons, husbands, brothers go to war to kill and maim or be killed or maimed.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-7-2022?r=1fl2xg&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email.

Remember Peter, Paul and Mary’s song:  Where have all the flowers gone… the fathers gone… the husbands gone…the soldiers gone — where have all the graveyards gone?  When will they ever learn?  The white male-dominated society continues to keep the war machine going.  It continues to suppress women.  It continues to deny equal rights to people of color. In some states, that dominating destructive energy is attempting to deny other rights including those of transgender people.  And now, it’s trying to turn back the clock on women’s rights — which have never been equal — and strip away our rights to our own bodies, our own health, and our own personal choices.

I’ll not pretend to be as articulate as Dr. Richardson, but I share her article as a rally call to women. As we spiral towards self-destruction on many fronts from the environment to insane reptilian wars, it becomes more imperative that women take the helm — not the Marjorie Greene Taylors of the world — God no! — but women who can actually carry a heavier load in tough times with patience, and mercy, nurture, love, deep caring, through dialogue and love. Through a labor no man could suffer through, remember we, women, bring life into this world.  And  yet “man taketh it away.”

Thank you, Heather Cox Richardson for reminding us that Mothers’ Day is not a Hallmark Holiday, but was the beginning of a women’s empowerment movement which is still grinding on, two steps forward and, it appears, three steps backward.

I also encourage you to watch or read the PBS interview of Hillary Clinton and Alyse Nelson, Vital Voices’  president and CEO, a nonprofit organization that Clinton started with Madeleine Albright.   https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/hillary-clinton-discusses-war-in-ukraine-democracy-in-the-u-s-and-future-of-roe-v-wade.  Again, it’s an informative interview.

With that, I will leave the talking to those more educated than I.