When the morning sun back lights the petals
of your pale lavender iris blooms while we have coffee
in your garden
I slow down into the day, surrounded by your place
Your work, your love, your creation born of a long and loyal
connection to a place.
I drink in the beauty, the light, the
love.
Like a mellow tea
infusing my own despairing soul-
so that one more time I can
drive down the dirt road, back into the fray
and find my way.
Monday, May 16, 2016
Friday, May 6, 2016
The Globalization of Indifference
I don't like knocking on the doors of strangers, even if they are my neighbors, but I do. I do because I am worried about my country. I am worried about the future for my grand daughters. I am concerned... I cannot sleep very well when I think. Thinking has become a challenge.
I was born in 1956, 10 years after the second world war. My father was part of that war. My grandfather made his fortune from that war. My mother, a pacifist by nature said, " What else could be done about Hitler?"
Life was cut and dried for my parents. They sent us to Catholic school, took us to church every Sunday and gave us a warm and loving home. They talked about 'when' we would go to college, not 'if'. As parents go, they get an A-. They were really into grades.
The minus is because they could not see into the future. They refused to bend when the 60's hit, and their 2 oldest kids entered a world which they were ill prepared to understand, much less navigate. Drugs are not the main cause of mental illness, it is far more complex than that. The 2 oldest are still mentally ill. I feel sad for my parents. I have 2 kids and every day I thank the universe that they are not mentally ill.
I ponder the question of mental illness continually. Nature, nurture, drugs, toxic chemicals, environmental pollution, existential sadness......so many factors in the soup of humanity. I seek enlightenment, not so that I can become a guru, but so that I can outrun depression and mental illness. It works, I can say, yoga brings me to another level. I wish my older siblings had been able to find something to give them peace before the black dog of depression got its final firm intractable grip upon them, and they fell.
The current weird political scene brings the whole metal illness issue forward for me. I watch the machinations, the angry rationalizations, the caustic sound bites. It reminds me of the bad days when my sick siblings were verbalizing. I know sickness from close up. It is a manifestation of something buried deep inside a wounded person. The person does not know how much harm their sickness creates. The wounded person is too narcissistic to have a sense of the whole.
I wish it were possible to beg the world not to fall into the mental illness hole. "There it is". I might say. "Watch out, don't step there- it is horrible and hard to come away from!" But words are only words. We live in a world of too many overblown, ubiquitous words.
When spring blossoms, the air warms, flowers bloom, I feel the benediction of nature. I thank the sun for browning my skin and sprouting my seeds. I take the children out to feel the world, the woodsy woods and the windy wind. What else can I do? And I still love words, believing they will untangle us from the tangle.
I was born in 1956, 10 years after the second world war. My father was part of that war. My grandfather made his fortune from that war. My mother, a pacifist by nature said, " What else could be done about Hitler?"
Life was cut and dried for my parents. They sent us to Catholic school, took us to church every Sunday and gave us a warm and loving home. They talked about 'when' we would go to college, not 'if'. As parents go, they get an A-. They were really into grades.
The minus is because they could not see into the future. They refused to bend when the 60's hit, and their 2 oldest kids entered a world which they were ill prepared to understand, much less navigate. Drugs are not the main cause of mental illness, it is far more complex than that. The 2 oldest are still mentally ill. I feel sad for my parents. I have 2 kids and every day I thank the universe that they are not mentally ill.
I ponder the question of mental illness continually. Nature, nurture, drugs, toxic chemicals, environmental pollution, existential sadness......so many factors in the soup of humanity. I seek enlightenment, not so that I can become a guru, but so that I can outrun depression and mental illness. It works, I can say, yoga brings me to another level. I wish my older siblings had been able to find something to give them peace before the black dog of depression got its final firm intractable grip upon them, and they fell.
The current weird political scene brings the whole metal illness issue forward for me. I watch the machinations, the angry rationalizations, the caustic sound bites. It reminds me of the bad days when my sick siblings were verbalizing. I know sickness from close up. It is a manifestation of something buried deep inside a wounded person. The person does not know how much harm their sickness creates. The wounded person is too narcissistic to have a sense of the whole.
I wish it were possible to beg the world not to fall into the mental illness hole. "There it is". I might say. "Watch out, don't step there- it is horrible and hard to come away from!" But words are only words. We live in a world of too many overblown, ubiquitous words.
When spring blossoms, the air warms, flowers bloom, I feel the benediction of nature. I thank the sun for browning my skin and sprouting my seeds. I take the children out to feel the world, the woodsy woods and the windy wind. What else can I do? And I still love words, believing they will untangle us from the tangle.
Wednesday, April 27, 2016
April 27
This 27th day of April, and the 27th birthday
you have missed. You would be 62.
Frozen in time, I see you as a Dad
The silly things you would say to the kids,
make them cheesy potato puffs.
Let them swing a hammer alongside you,
Sing them songs and change the words around.
Little kids, your boys.
How much we left behind when
we ran away from that house
where you spent your last night
of life when we were all
so young.
you have missed. You would be 62.
Frozen in time, I see you as a Dad
The silly things you would say to the kids,
make them cheesy potato puffs.
Let them swing a hammer alongside you,
Sing them songs and change the words around.
Little kids, your boys.
How much we left behind when
we ran away from that house
where you spent your last night
of life when we were all
so young.
Sunday, March 27, 2016
Feeling the Bern on Equinox 2016
My friend and I arrived at the Bernie Sanders rally in Vancouver, Washington. By 9 am on this cool, rainy spring equinox Sunday morning, hundreds, maybe even a thousand people were already lined up in front of the High School Gymnasium building where Senator Sanders was scheduled to speak at 1 pm.
By 11:00 the line stretched across the football fields and wound along a walkway through the grounds. The end of the line was slowly building down the street as we watched. The rain blew in on a cold bluster, but everyone remained patiently waiting.
I waited in line for the porta-potty for 20 minutes and spoke to the 2 young men in front and behind me in the line. I shared my umbrella as we discussed our country, what we love about it and what is not working. I found them to be extremely well informed on the same issues which concern me. It is a relief to speak to people who share the same values. It is invigorating. Especially because this crowd was not negative and outwardly angry.
I followed another volunteer around carrying her box of flyers. We became friends as the morning wore on and the rain continued to fall.
Why would thousands of people do this? Because they are hungry to hear a politician who speaks to them, not at them.
When Senator Sanders arrived, the overflow crowd on the lawn outside was eagerly waiting to see him, even a glimpse. He gave them better. He got up on a dais and spoke for 10 minutes, even as the main crowd of 5000 awaited him inside the Gym. After he spoke outside, he spoke again to the overflow crowd in the lobby of the gym, and then he went into the main event and gave an inspirational address the the 4000 inside the event, the ones who had waited for many hours.(I heard some people camped overnight).
The citizenry is not merely hungry, we are starving. If we can bring our numbers in, the money of the rich will diminish in importance. Our hunger will then be our asset.
By 11:00 the line stretched across the football fields and wound along a walkway through the grounds. The end of the line was slowly building down the street as we watched. The rain blew in on a cold bluster, but everyone remained patiently waiting.
I waited in line for the porta-potty for 20 minutes and spoke to the 2 young men in front and behind me in the line. I shared my umbrella as we discussed our country, what we love about it and what is not working. I found them to be extremely well informed on the same issues which concern me. It is a relief to speak to people who share the same values. It is invigorating. Especially because this crowd was not negative and outwardly angry.
I followed another volunteer around carrying her box of flyers. We became friends as the morning wore on and the rain continued to fall.
Why would thousands of people do this? Because they are hungry to hear a politician who speaks to them, not at them.
When Senator Sanders arrived, the overflow crowd on the lawn outside was eagerly waiting to see him, even a glimpse. He gave them better. He got up on a dais and spoke for 10 minutes, even as the main crowd of 5000 awaited him inside the Gym. After he spoke outside, he spoke again to the overflow crowd in the lobby of the gym, and then he went into the main event and gave an inspirational address the the 4000 inside the event, the ones who had waited for many hours.(I heard some people camped overnight).
The citizenry is not merely hungry, we are starving. If we can bring our numbers in, the money of the rich will diminish in importance. Our hunger will then be our asset.
Thursday, January 21, 2016
Making Sense of Nonsense
I have held off writing about this frustrating and disturbing event in my home state for 21 days now. Tonight the muse moves and I cannot help myself.
An alternate title for this essay could be "An open letter to Ammon Bundy". I don't want to give his name any more press than it has already gotten since he and a gang of gun toting, highly delusional and selfish white men decided to take over a huge, very famous and well loved bird sanctuary. I don't include him in my title. If, however, I could sit down and relay my thoughts to him in person (not deluding my self for a minute that he has the ability to listen), these are some of them, censored.
Why do you think you are special? So far I have learned that your father owes 1 million dollars in BLM range fees, and you owe a loan for 500,000 to the government. As it stands right now the cost of your occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge is $133,000 per day. I was never too good at math, being an English major, but I can use a calculator and it seems that your family now owes our country (taxpayers of which I am one) $5,793,000.00.
Even after seeing the people of Burns, whom you purport to 'represent', beg you, in tears, to leave, you are unmoved. Is it the guns, the religion, or a combination which give you that stoic sense of power? People who need guns to advance their cause have no morals, and no real cause.
You reiterate how your 'way of life' has changed, affected like all occupations by the circumstances of our current times. To understand that everyone is affected by water shortages, land scarcity, outsourcing, corporatization of industries (like the raising and marketing of beef), and many other factors requires a broad perspective.
In case you were not sure, your pain in this is not relegated solely to ranchers and farmers. I have 2 stories to illustrate the economic challenges of working families in the west:
The first is the image I hold of my young husband falling into bed after a work day lifting a hoe-dad for 8 hours, dead asleep, dirty work clothes and all, before dinner. He was a tree planter west of Port Angeles in 1978. The logging jobs paid more, but the timber had been ravaged to where the Spotted Owl was merely an unfortunate poster child and the loggers were bemoaning their lost 'way of life'. Emotions ran high around the North Olympic Peninsula in those years, but we worked at what we could, raised our 2 children, and tried to improvise into an obviously evolving economy.
After my husband's death at 35, I worked for an independent bookstore on the Oregon Coast for 10 years. It was a beautiful store, well run and the recipient of continuous compliments. We watched the profit margin fall steadily every year as big corporate stores, then Amazon undercut our prices. People would come in and take notes on our carefully chosen titles, then go away and order them cheaper somewhere else. By 2003 the doors closed forever, and the owners left with nothing. The world is a mercenary place. Did your Mormon parents tell you that? My Catholic parents did not tell me that. It has a been a long, rude awakening all my idealistic life.
I have read that you have 6 children. I assume your wife has total responsibility for all of them during your male bonding hiatus away from real life. What are your children learning from all the laws you have broken in the past 21 days? Will you be surprised if they end up having no respect for the property of others? What about their school activities and the nurturing they are missing? And, while I am on the subject, why in the world did you have so many kids, especially if you see your calling as being somewhere else besides home? I call that irresponsible.
Given these facts, why do you consider yourself a leader, and why do others? Because you wear a cowboy hat? Because you consider yourself a Mormon patriarch? Because you were raised to 'know' you were destined for a life of privilege?
By this time you must have heard the refrain ... if your gang had a different skin color, or a religion other than Christian, you would have all been taken out by now. There is no way to end this missive, no way for me to go to sleep tonight and feel unworried about the birds I love at Malheur, and the damage you are doling every day. There is no way to address income inequality, corporate oligarchy, the apathy of affluence and the general unfairness of life. You have only made my sleep worse, my prayers multi-faceted : Please God, don't let people with guns rule our world.
An alternate title for this essay could be "An open letter to Ammon Bundy". I don't want to give his name any more press than it has already gotten since he and a gang of gun toting, highly delusional and selfish white men decided to take over a huge, very famous and well loved bird sanctuary. I don't include him in my title. If, however, I could sit down and relay my thoughts to him in person (not deluding my self for a minute that he has the ability to listen), these are some of them, censored.
Why do you think you are special? So far I have learned that your father owes 1 million dollars in BLM range fees, and you owe a loan for 500,000 to the government. As it stands right now the cost of your occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge is $133,000 per day. I was never too good at math, being an English major, but I can use a calculator and it seems that your family now owes our country (taxpayers of which I am one) $5,793,000.00.
Even after seeing the people of Burns, whom you purport to 'represent', beg you, in tears, to leave, you are unmoved. Is it the guns, the religion, or a combination which give you that stoic sense of power? People who need guns to advance their cause have no morals, and no real cause.
You reiterate how your 'way of life' has changed, affected like all occupations by the circumstances of our current times. To understand that everyone is affected by water shortages, land scarcity, outsourcing, corporatization of industries (like the raising and marketing of beef), and many other factors requires a broad perspective.
In case you were not sure, your pain in this is not relegated solely to ranchers and farmers. I have 2 stories to illustrate the economic challenges of working families in the west:
The first is the image I hold of my young husband falling into bed after a work day lifting a hoe-dad for 8 hours, dead asleep, dirty work clothes and all, before dinner. He was a tree planter west of Port Angeles in 1978. The logging jobs paid more, but the timber had been ravaged to where the Spotted Owl was merely an unfortunate poster child and the loggers were bemoaning their lost 'way of life'. Emotions ran high around the North Olympic Peninsula in those years, but we worked at what we could, raised our 2 children, and tried to improvise into an obviously evolving economy.
After my husband's death at 35, I worked for an independent bookstore on the Oregon Coast for 10 years. It was a beautiful store, well run and the recipient of continuous compliments. We watched the profit margin fall steadily every year as big corporate stores, then Amazon undercut our prices. People would come in and take notes on our carefully chosen titles, then go away and order them cheaper somewhere else. By 2003 the doors closed forever, and the owners left with nothing. The world is a mercenary place. Did your Mormon parents tell you that? My Catholic parents did not tell me that. It has a been a long, rude awakening all my idealistic life.
I have read that you have 6 children. I assume your wife has total responsibility for all of them during your male bonding hiatus away from real life. What are your children learning from all the laws you have broken in the past 21 days? Will you be surprised if they end up having no respect for the property of others? What about their school activities and the nurturing they are missing? And, while I am on the subject, why in the world did you have so many kids, especially if you see your calling as being somewhere else besides home? I call that irresponsible.
Given these facts, why do you consider yourself a leader, and why do others? Because you wear a cowboy hat? Because you consider yourself a Mormon patriarch? Because you were raised to 'know' you were destined for a life of privilege?
By this time you must have heard the refrain ... if your gang had a different skin color, or a religion other than Christian, you would have all been taken out by now. There is no way to end this missive, no way for me to go to sleep tonight and feel unworried about the birds I love at Malheur, and the damage you are doling every day. There is no way to address income inequality, corporate oligarchy, the apathy of affluence and the general unfairness of life. You have only made my sleep worse, my prayers multi-faceted : Please God, don't let people with guns rule our world.
Thursday, December 31, 2015
Evening Walk with a Baby
Let me not forget our hour long walk,
along the sidewalks and paths between
the houses on your hill
As the sun descended west and we
heard chick-a-dees in the tall firs
robins all a-twitter of a June eve.
Pink roses spilled out onto the sidewalk
we touched and smelled.
I kissed your head, your cheek and told you
"Grammy loves you, Grammy loves, loves, loves you."
From the side, looking down at you in the front pack
I could see a little smile-
you knew, your fingers holding my finger,
our arms together, held before us.
I carried you last night,
while your tired mom spent that hour in massage
When we arrived home she was smiling.
You had fallen asleep to the sounds of the evening birds.
along the sidewalks and paths between
the houses on your hill
As the sun descended west and we
heard chick-a-dees in the tall firs
robins all a-twitter of a June eve.
Pink roses spilled out onto the sidewalk
we touched and smelled.
I kissed your head, your cheek and told you
"Grammy loves you, Grammy loves, loves, loves you."
From the side, looking down at you in the front pack
I could see a little smile-
you knew, your fingers holding my finger,
our arms together, held before us.
I carried you last night,
while your tired mom spent that hour in massage
When we arrived home she was smiling.
You had fallen asleep to the sounds of the evening birds.
Saturday, November 28, 2015
45 years Later
Dear Diane,
I am in one of my odd Saturday nights at the beginning of a new fixer house project. I am listening to Pandora on my computer, drinking wine and filling nail holes in the walls.
The station I have created is called "Aaron Neville". The songs this choice offers me as the night wears on begin to sound like our high school years: Bill Withers, Ray Charles, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles - I am transported to 9th grade, to knowing you and to my memories of your stories of the Maxie family and the cool Seattle connections you and your family had. It seemed your favorite extended family was a black family, and when you told of the parties and fun times I was entranced and a bit jealous. It sounded like there was so much life, laughter and music.
The songs are about overwhelming love, sadness, feeling uncertain and weak, about wanting to dance- \move the body to anything.
I remember how I admired and envied your experiences with another culture, one so close, and yet a lake and a bridge away. I am sure this admiration was one of the big reasons I joined the busing program to Garfield High School from the safe suburbs of Bellevue to the unknowns of the Central Area of Seattle.
Listening to soul music reminds me of the vapid white culture I was trying to slough off. The world was exploding around us with the War in Vietnam, John, Martin and Bobby killed while we were still in grade school. There was so much to process for a 15 year old kid who was paying attention.
We were hungry for the world, you, Lori and me. I don't know why or how it happened, but the 3 of us had this craving to break out, to find some answers, make some black friends and become renewed in the process. We sat on a bus for over an hour every morning to go to a completely unfamiliar school. What a bonding experience that was, and how difficult it became for me. I was petrified most of the time.
Soul music, what more perfect backdrop for those memories. The synthesis of pain and joy at once, affirming life. How much I suspected, but how little I knew then of what that music represented in our country's horrible history.
It is fitting that I am listening to 70's Soul Music in 2015, 47 years since we met. The times are just as confusing and uncertain as they were then. Now young black people are still being shot by police, and the world is still erupting in pockets of violence. Our country is still engaged in actions of 'war', and the chasm between the rich and the poor is worse than ever.
The details change, the power structures dividing and creating fear stay the same. The music, thankfully, is still there: "Lean on Me", "Stand By Me", ~ "Ain't no Sunshine When She's Gone".
I am in one of my odd Saturday nights at the beginning of a new fixer house project. I am listening to Pandora on my computer, drinking wine and filling nail holes in the walls.
The station I have created is called "Aaron Neville". The songs this choice offers me as the night wears on begin to sound like our high school years: Bill Withers, Ray Charles, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles - I am transported to 9th grade, to knowing you and to my memories of your stories of the Maxie family and the cool Seattle connections you and your family had. It seemed your favorite extended family was a black family, and when you told of the parties and fun times I was entranced and a bit jealous. It sounded like there was so much life, laughter and music.
The songs are about overwhelming love, sadness, feeling uncertain and weak, about wanting to dance- \move the body to anything.
I remember how I admired and envied your experiences with another culture, one so close, and yet a lake and a bridge away. I am sure this admiration was one of the big reasons I joined the busing program to Garfield High School from the safe suburbs of Bellevue to the unknowns of the Central Area of Seattle.
Listening to soul music reminds me of the vapid white culture I was trying to slough off. The world was exploding around us with the War in Vietnam, John, Martin and Bobby killed while we were still in grade school. There was so much to process for a 15 year old kid who was paying attention.
We were hungry for the world, you, Lori and me. I don't know why or how it happened, but the 3 of us had this craving to break out, to find some answers, make some black friends and become renewed in the process. We sat on a bus for over an hour every morning to go to a completely unfamiliar school. What a bonding experience that was, and how difficult it became for me. I was petrified most of the time.
Soul music, what more perfect backdrop for those memories. The synthesis of pain and joy at once, affirming life. How much I suspected, but how little I knew then of what that music represented in our country's horrible history.
It is fitting that I am listening to 70's Soul Music in 2015, 47 years since we met. The times are just as confusing and uncertain as they were then. Now young black people are still being shot by police, and the world is still erupting in pockets of violence. Our country is still engaged in actions of 'war', and the chasm between the rich and the poor is worse than ever.
The details change, the power structures dividing and creating fear stay the same. The music, thankfully, is still there: "Lean on Me", "Stand By Me", ~ "Ain't no Sunshine When She's Gone".
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