The Decision

Since the decision came down on Friday (you know what decision I mean), I have been a wreck, and have been praying to the Goddess that I speak with wisdom in this blog. 

In this lifetime, I never became pregnant, so the abortion issue was never personal. To be honest, I found it morally troubling (yes, up to a point I really "get" some of the objections of the other side), and because my particular journey had other dreams and challenges and it has been all I could do to stay alive, housed, and reasonably safe, I didn't expect that this long-anticipated announcement would really touch a chord.

I was wrong. It was an almost literal kick in the stomach. Since Friday, I have been angry, depressed, numb, in pain, in tears, then back again. Because even though there are countless women who have fought Roe v. Wade, in the end, it feels like the male paradigm/patriarchy/left brain construct pulling the strings, bringing all of us women back under control. In all of recorded human history, women have only had one recent millisecond of rights in only certain parts of the world, and yet clearly even those rights (including making our own ethical and moral choices) are potentially in peril. If we have to fight so hard to take part in a paradigm that keeps pushing us back, perhaps that paradigm's values are essentially just too contrary to ours.

There is a whole lot more I could say on this subject, but I'm too drained. Friday provided an almost heartbreaking related paradox, though. After I wrote that day's blog post, I went out on a few errands. (I don't have a smart phone, so I hadn't heard about the Supreme Court's decision.) I was sitting on a bench waiting for a bus when a queue of about twelve teacher-accompanied two-year olds holding a rope walked by. A little boy in the center looked over at me and started calling, "Mama! Mama!" He reached out his arms toward me, and called again. I didn't quite know what to do, so I waved at him and said hi. One of the teachers apologized to me, saying that at this age, kids seem to think that all women are their mamas. I told her please, don't apologize. I never had children, so it sounded good to be called "Mama". As they walked away, of course, tears were rolling down my cheeks, knowing that this might be the first and last time in this lifetime that I would hear that word addressed to me. And when I got back to where I am staying, I saw the special news report on television. 

Storms

Last night, we had one of those strange summer storms that doesn't go the way you expect. There had been all sorts of warnings on TV, and I had put my emergency bag at the head of the basement stairs in case I had to retreat down there. The sky wasn't the greenish color that you expect from a strong, possibly tornadic storm; it was orange, even on the eastern horizon, bizarre for 9 pm. There were dramatic black clouds and there was lots of lightning, but very little thunder and virtually no rain or wind, although west of here was inundated with several inches of water. My transistor radio kept interspersing classical music with Lake Superior maritime warnings, but in the end it was, I guess you could say, all bark but no bite. More storms are expected today (the sky is looking very peculiar again) and we'll see what they bring.

I guess I'll leave analysis of steps forward and backward in the gun debate to others. All I know is that I have never felt very "American", and at this moment I feel less so than ever. There is very little about our way of life that I understand, but the weapons phenomenon is the most baffling of all. Why do we, as a nationality, seem to have such a willingness, even an eagerness, to "protect" ourselves from our own fellow "countrymen"? Why do we seem to have the desire to attack other people at the slightest provocation? Why are we so angry? Our country was birthed in war; does that mean we are destined to remain in a continual state of conflict? Last but not least, would a society more respectful of women (and the value of love) operate this way?

If there are only two things in this world, love and fear, then we must be the most fearful nation of all. It is sad. It is embarrassing. It makes me wonder how we are respected on the world stage, although we still rightly inspire in other areas. My only longterm consolation is my firm belief that humanity is entering an era so unified and aligned with love that people will eventually have no use for weapons. Attacking other beings (or other countries) will be considered so bizarre and pointless, the phenomenon will die out -- and I suppose people with that inclination will as well. This storm will pass, but it may take years. Will I still be here? Who knows? And overpowering environmental shifts may make the gun debate moot.

Speaking of the environment, I have just had one of those mixed senior experiences. I had bought some environmentally-friendly dish detergent and was eager to try it. Yesterday, I struggled to pull up the push/pull plastic cap, and once I did, I squeezed and squeezed, and only the smallest drop of detergent came out. I blamed my poor right wrist, broken three years ago, and my advancing age, and instead of being happy with my purchase, I became demoralized and frustrated. So this morning, after another fruitless effort, I decided, heck, I'll just have to twist the whole top off each time...but once I did this, I discovered the problem. The top of the actual bottle was sealed with a little dime-sized piece of plastic! And despite the minuscule little additional tab of plastic I was apparently supposed to pull this thing off with, I couldn't do it! Eventually, I used a paring knife to poke a hole in the plastic circle, and re-screwed on the plastic cap. Lo and behold, I can now easily squeeze out the desired soap. But really? What is the point of adding a little extra iota of plastic to this product? Plastic bottles can be recycled (whether they all are, I don't know...) but it's these little extraneous bits of un-recyclable plastic that are going to kill us, especially given that their existence is fear-driven. As a "senior citizen", I can live with the remote possibility that someone might randomly put something nasty into my bottle of dish detergent. If they do that, whether I live or die, that is their bad karma, not mine. What I can't live with is struggling to open every single bottle and jar I buy these days -- milk, jam, relish, pain reliever, shampoo...I keep a thick blue rubber band at hand in the kitchen at all times, which sometimes helps me grip better. You know you're in your own "new era" when you start thinking twice about your purchases, not because of the environment but based on ease of opening! When did this happen?! (At sixty-five?....)

Hang in there, folks. I guess if nothing else, it's all "interesting"!

On Summer Solstice

Duluth saw the summer solstice in with a thunderstorm that circled around and around and around again for four hours, almost guaranteeing no sleep! I guess that's oddly fitting for the longest day of the year.

Last week, a friend of mine passed away after a long cancer journey. It was a shock, but not a surprise, if you know what I mean. She was literally the guidepost angel who first said, "Why don't you try Duluth?" when I was driving a little red car around the country; we were out of touch for years, then reconnected. It was so important to circle back round again, and I'm glad to have had the new opportunity to tell her how life-changing it had been to meet her. She was a wise soul with a very, very beautiful and distinctive speaking voice. 

The concept of things being shocking but not surprising seems to fit a lot of things right now. I've been noodling around on paper with yet another essay about all the violence in our world, but it is wrong for today. So maybe the best thing to say is this; I play around more and more with the idea of life being "music". The more beautiful the music some of us sing or speak or write (or dance or paint or sculpt...or express in any form), the harder it is for others (those with less access to Divine Love) to function. They cannot sing, they can only lash out in frustration at not being able to sing. They cannot bear beautiful music in any form. The results are shocking, and so painful, but not surprising. What a challenging fine line -- to feel the pain of our times but still sing/vibrate with wisdom and love...and to keep doing it on whatever side we are on of that sliver of a divide between life and "death". 

Upside down

Maybe it comes from my particular family background, or being a woman in a society largely created by men, or my unusual life experiences, or perhaps I am just a little too contrarian. As some of you may have noticed (!), I seem to need to turn everything upside down. 

Over the years, I have been to Yellowstone National Park once or twice, and it is certainly shocking to see the video footage of the flooding and destruction of the human infrastructure there. Is there a "however..." coming? Yes, of course. In news reports, there has been a lot of talk about nature "leaving a path of destruction". 

Could this not be turned completely on its head? That nature is only doing what it has done for millions of years? These are the very forces that created the natural wonders of the landscape we see today, carving, eroding, spewing out from the center of the earth, pressurizing sediment into stone and sending materials downstream...in a sense, so what else is new? The current severity of these events is almost certainly due to humanity's thoughtless actions, but nature has never stood still. That we expect it to stand still is our hubris. Perhaps, when humans come along and build roads and bridges and dams and homes and developments and cities, expecting permanence, Nature (be that force "he", "she", "they", or well beyond gender) says to itself, "Darn it, here come humans again, paving a path of destruction..."

If the last few years have been about anything, I suspect that they have been "about" weaning us away from that mind frame I mentioned the other day, that human ingenuity can solve any problem. It's just astonishing that we think we are smarter than the forces that created stars, universes, millions of other planets, and, heck, the human body and the energies at the center of our own earth that we barely know about. I feel for the people whose homes and lives are disrupted around the world, for any reason. I've almost never had a "normal" life, and I know how terrifying and upsetting it is to live with no certainties. It can be heartbreaking, every minute of every day. But personally, I'm now heartbroken enough and upside down enough to be rooting, in essence, for Nature as She (my perspective) tries to set things back in balance. If I die or am set even more adrift at this amazingly tumultuous moment in earth's history, I'll be honored.

'Splained

By 1982 and '83, if I was still in tears, it was (yes) in part because I was homesick for England, but it was also because I realized that in order to pay back my heavy load of student loans, I needed to work within a capitalist system that I already realized I didn't fully believe in. On a few occasions, I engaged my favorite capitalist in conversation, hoping I would learn something that would help me function better. Yet in the end, the explanations didn't open my heart, and, if anything, made me more dubious. Even then, I saw a direct link between human actions and environmental problems, and I rather snarkily said something like: "So capitalism is men making a lot of money causing problems that they can then make more money trying to solve?" There was a lot of harrumphing about human inventiveness being the solution to any problem...and at the end of one more similar conversation, this man threw up his hands and told me to go away, that I was scary.

What is extraordinary is that never then or subsequently has anyone ever apparently said to themselves, "Here is an unusually intelligent and well-educated woman who is troubled by our system. I wonder what she sees?" It was always a one-way "conversation", people (yes, sometimes women!) "'splaining" why we all have to play this game to survive, and advising me to just get on with it.

Fast forward to the present. There's a car advertisement on TV that is, I must say, beautifully done and quite striking. An impossibly handsome white man (who looks rather like the illustrations of Jesus in old fashioned children's books) is driving an impossibly beautiful SUV up and down a beach, trailing a large rake. He is raking up the human-generated trash on the beach so that he can put it in plastic bags and take it to the dump. Once that stretch of the beach is clean, smiling sea turtles (which can represent Mother Earth) walk out of the ocean onto the sand. The message seems to be, if you buy the right car, you, too, can save the planet.

OK, I just have to say this. Saving the earth might have happened 50 or 100 or 500 years ago, if the concerns of women and under-represented groups, and concerns about the environment, had been fully engaged as new inventions and technology were being developed. We might have saved the earth if we had proceeded far more slowly and thoughtfully. As it is now, Nature is the only force with the power to "save"/re-balance earth, and that solution may or may not be to our liking. My version of that ad would have the man getting out of his car, standing and looking out to sea, and saying, "I am sorry for my part in throwing this planet into disharmony. What would you have me do?" And the advertisement might end with him silently listening for the answer, then walking down the beach away from the car.

Jubilee

Forty-one years ago (Lordy, how ancient one must have to be to say that!), I was in the final few months of working toward my Masters of Music in historical musicology at Royal Holloway College/University of London. The college was in Surrey, less than a mile from the entrance to Windsor Great Park. Early on in my year there, I bought a used bicycle, and would frequently cycle around the verdant park. One day, I pulled over to let a rather elegant black car motor slowly by me, only to realize with astonishment that the driver was Queen Elizabeth! When I returned to college, my friends said that, indeed, she liked to take drives around the park when she was at Windsor Castle. One afternoon in the spring of 1981, our choir (one of the few mixed male and female college chapel choirs in the country at the time, and frankly the reason I had chosen Holloway) sang choral evensong at St. George's Chapel, Windsor. Unfortunately, the Queen was not in residence that day, but oh, what a magnificent chapel it is to sing in!

I had one other close-ish encounter with the Queen that year. Some friends and I went to a polo match that Prince Charles was playing in, and at halftime, when attendees are invited onto the field to stomp the divots back into place, I found myself close enough to the Royal Box to clearly see Queen Elizabeth and the other royals. I am embarrassed to say that the person I really wanted to see was "Lady Di", who we were all so curious about; a few weeks later, I joined the throngs experiencing the fireworks in London the night before Charles and Diana's wedding, but watched the wedding itself on television with college friends the following morning, toasting with champagne, of course!

That whole academic year, I knew one thing for certain. England was where I belonged, and I would have a whole lifetime of these kinds of experiences ahead of me. I didn't know how it would happen, but I knew it would, so I was completely relaxed about it. Through the summer months, I kept my focus on my degree work, finishing my transcription and thesis (typed on a typewriter!) However, after my oral examination in September, the year was suddenly over. Friends drove me to Heathrow and saw me into the airport, at which point I started crying and never stopped the whole flight back to the U.S. Even today, I am convinced I left half of myself over there, and despite numerous return trips, making England my home has remained painfully out of reach. There are a host of reasons for this, some good, some, in hindsight, ridiculous; I don't think one day has gone by since 1981 that I haven't been seriously homesick, sometimes wretchedly so. This is not a case of "typical" American anglophilia. It is something so deep that even I do not understand it. And at 66, it's less "boo hoo, I'm not where I want to be", but more a sense of having work left to do in this lifetime that has something to do with England. I pray every day for the clarity to know what that is, and how and when to proceed.

Anyway, last Thursday morning, when I watched the pared-down Royal Family walk out onto the balcony, I was fine for about five minutes, then burst into tears and had to turn the television off. It was like, bless them all, may it go well, but I cannot bear being an ocean away any better now than ten, twenty, or thirty years ago.

Still, once I pulled myself together, I started to feel a great deal of Jubilee gratitude. I am thankful for those experiences so long ago, that I had them at all (and some memorable ones in my subsequent visits!). I am thankful for the Queen's astonishingly long service to Great Britain and the world. The notion of royalty is controversial these days, and I totally get that. Yet as a woman, I cannot help but wonder if there is any other context which would nourish such an outpouring of adulation for a woman. Multitudes cheered in the streets of London this past weekend, not to mention across that country and around the world. It was an expression of genuine love and admiration. Just to know what that kind of love looks like, sounds like, and feels like, is a priceless gift!

Monday Miscellany

Normally, I cannot go more than three or four days before writing again, but late last week, I was like the proverbial "deer in the headlights", and simply did not know what to say. The simultaneity of multiple mass shootings in America and the Jubilee in Britain was just too much. I am not sure that the weekend has improved ability to think clearly, but I'll give it a go. 

There is not much I can add to the gun violence topic that hasn't been said, or that I haven't said in the past. So the following is, truly, "miscellany". I guess what mystifies me more than anything else is how thousands of years of religious teachings ("Thou shalt not kill", "Turn the other cheek") have led to this. But not just to these extreme incidents...to a culture so steeped in violence and conflict (and in its least overtly harmful form, competition) that we don't even recognize it for what it is. If there's a silver lining in the current moment, perhaps it is visibility. We cannot not see these events. It is an important teaching moment. Of course, there are widely varying interpretations of what is happening, but we can no longer pretend that we are some kind of idyllic "shining city on a hill". We can't put a bandage on the horror and cover it up.

Putting aside who uses these weapons, and what the laws should or should not be in this regard, I also need to say this. To me, to see a gun (even on display on a wall in a news report or advertisement) is inherently traumatizing and threatening. To know that there are more guns than people in the United States is inherently traumatizing and threatening. Weapons don't need to be "used" to be a source of violent energy. The question to be asked is, why do we create so many weapons in the first place? "Fixing" the smaller picture won't "fix" the larger picture...

I can't even talk about the Jubilee in the same post, so I'll save that for another day. One more snapshot of life in Duluth. The other day, I walked with a friend to the Rose Garden on the Lakewalk. It was beautifully sunny but, of course, cool near the water. My joke about this time of year is that you leave the house attired in: a sunhat and/or sunglasses, a short-sleeved shirt, a fleece jacket, capri trousers, wool socks, and walking sandals. (Or, back in the '90s, my other joke was, summer is when you get to unzip your parka. Climate chaos has made it slightly too warm for that now!) Anyway, the roses (not out yet, of course) have been lovingly tended, and I look forward to seeing them in bloom. Lilacs are starting to come out, trees are at that light green stage of leafy, and dandelions are rampant. Nights have been cold enough to cover plants, but I've decided, enough is enough, and starting tonight, I'm going to leave them to their own devices. A stretch of nighttime 40's and daytime 60's is predicted, so they should be OK. 

Hmm, all in all, I'd rather think about roses.