At dawn, fog sleeping in the trees
holds captive dimming street lights,
fireflies caught in its ethereal web.
Gaping new moon yawns her stars to bed
beneath the creeping blanket of day.
Commuters still haven’t grumbled
from their beds, but we began our job
an hour ago. The river never sleeps,
not even under winter’s ice, so we dutifully set
our paper sails upon its whispering rills.
We know breezy shadows will deliver
bright thoughts of day, of love, of life,
upon our harboring doorstep.
This is our time, my mind’s pen and I,
and our workday is almost over.
The Arapaho boys came across the dead body of the Rev. Linus Quimby wrapped in a wool blanket at the bottom of a buffalo wallow, a thick book clutched in his frozen hands and an expression of joy upon his face.
“It is already the Moon When the Buffalo Calves’ Noses Turn Brown and the first snow came last night, so to find a man, even a foolish white man, traveling without a horse or even a dog to carry his provisions shows he was as crazy as he looks,” said the younger boy, taking the blanket from the would-be missionary.
“Look at the useless fire he made of these white skins with markings, not the leavings of the buffalo or even a stick from the trees on the banks of the Niinéniiniicíihéhe’,,” said the older boy, as he relieved his brother of the blanket and Rev. Quimby of a knife and a piece of flint.
After riding east until the sun had almost reached its highest point, the boys found the remains of Rev. Quimby’s horse being picked clean by coyotes and birds, stripped of its saddle by a roaming band of Cheyenne hunters and with more of those marked skins scattered on the yellow grass in the melting snow.
If the boys could read, they might notice one that was dated two days before, November 20, 1830, and it said:Last night I burned all my maps, Psalm 23 and First Thessalonians from my Bible, my Lord God, because where I am going in Your name, I have faith You shall guide me, help me lead the sons of Shem back to you, and we shall never be lost again.
The cold returned this past week, and many trees and flowers seem to have taken a deep breath and halted their rush into Spring. Were the maple sugaring season ongoing, these would have been perfect sugaring days and the sugar houses would be boiling madly. (The warmth of a couple of weeks ago stopped the sugar season short.) Now, there is an air of expectancy in the natural world, a quickening and watchfulness, for we are in April, and returning warmth and renewing rains become daily more likely.
The seasonal round brings comfort and a sense of belonging. Maple sugaring gear is cleaned and put away. A few people have made it into their gardens, preparing for the warm season to come. Neighbors, yard and garden tools in hand, wave to one another. “This sure is weird weather, ain’t it,” echoes down the block. A few daffodils have burst into bloom in south-facing flower gardens, some making their way indoors to adorn tables. Throughout the neighborhood there is shared business and meaning.
Last week, in class, I showed the Bill Moyers interview with Bill T. Jones, Still Here. The video, from 1994, follows the MacArthur Award winning choreographer as he morns the loss of his mate, faces mortality via an AIDS diagnosis, and creates his groundbreaking dance, Still/Here. The video addresses many topics our culture still finds difficult, and does so with refreshing directness: death, terminal illness, homosexuality, loss, and race, among others.
The real focus of the film is difference, a too-hot-to-handle concern in many cultures. Difference is a form of social glue, allowing us to identify ourselves in opposition to the other. It is also the source of creativity, innovation, and adventure, as well as some of our most threatening taboos. The tensions between these functions are played out daily in our cultures, our personal relationships, and our inner worlds. For many people around the world, accepting new technologies, no matter how socially disruptive, has become easier than accepting differences among human beings.
Of course, issues of difference demand attention in the therapy setting. Whether we sit with couples struggling with disagreements about how to manage daily life, young women critical of their body image, or youth and adults who carry labels of major mental illness and wrestle with unique experiences of the world, the underlying concerns are those of difference and acceptability. Always the questions held deep inside include, “Am I loveable as I am?” and “Am I safe?” These are not simple questions.
A walk in the forest offers the opportunity to see difference. No two plants of the same species are identical. Life history and microecology play an enormous role in the development of each individual. From the point of view of the forest, each is perfect. Only through the gaze of other organisms do individual plants acquire differentiated value. When humans are involved, value is most likely culturally ascribed. Persons of diverse cultures may well read the worth of an individual plant differently from one another, as may individuals of separate species.
Ideally, psychotherapy offers persons the opportunity to challenge internalized or culturally enacted views of difference in relationship to her or his life. In the process, it may place any number of subversive, liberatory tools at the disposal of those seeking help. Such therapy seeks to provide a space for the successful re-authoring of those stories that isolate and demean on the basis of rubrics of difference. In order to do so, patients are encouraged to challenge the authority of many voices, within and without. Yet, no one can successfully create a rewarding life alone; we each need others to witness and affirm our acts of courage and self authoring. The therapist is a necessary, yet usually insufficient witness.
Would you share with us your healing stories of seeing, and of being seen by others?
Years ago, Tammy Wynette admonished women to “stand by your man.” But judging by Ray Rice’s assault on his (at the time) fiance Janay Palmer, it would seem that Janay was unable to stand at all. In fact, the last time I saw them together on that by-now-iconic video, she was not standing, but lying face-down and being dragged, rag-doll limp and unconscious, across the elevator-door threshold by her now-husband Ray Rice, rather like a human-shaped football being carried triumphantly across the goal line after a heroic third-and-long play. The Baltimore Ravens organization even cheered in a Tweet regarding Mrs. Rice’s alleged “role” in the assault: Janay Rice says she deeply regrets the role that she played the night of the incident. It is unclear precisely what that “role” was, beyond perhaps having the temerity to allow her head to get in the way of Ray Rice’s flying cantaloupe-sized fist. It’s also good to know that the Ravens have become so proficient in employing the standard defense in cases of rape and spousal abuse: blame the victim, then stonewall. All that was missing, no doubt because of the 140-character limit, was for the Ravens front office PR flacks to issue a schadenfreude-laden admonition to Janay to perhaps wear longer skirts next time. An “oldie, but goodie,” that!
At one point, it was equally unclear how John Harbaugh, head coach of the Ravens, and his staff could have missed seeing the video, as Harbaugh, in yesterday’s (8 September) news conference, alleges they did, for as long as they did. However, anonymous sources close to the Ravens front office assert that Harbaugh and the senior leadership of the Baltimore Ravens were on a recruiting and scouting mission prospecting for incipient football talent among university undergraduates on the outer moons of Saturn, and at the time the assault occurred, their spacecraft experienced a catastrophic failure of its entire polarization-modulated tachyonic communication system. This explains why, at the time of the one-sided “Battle of the Elevator,” Harbaugh & Co. missed seeing the video, whereas itinerant nomadic yak-herders wandering the wastes of central Siberia could watch it in high-def on their LTE-enabled Apple devices, courtesy of their local ISP YurtNet. Of course, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, leaving no gut unbusted in the process of earning his nearly $200,000 per week 2014 salary, acted with characteristic lapidary clarity, suspending Rice for … well … gee! … OK … two games then … well … gee! … OK … re-thinking the penalty in the wake of the public outcry and suspending Rice for … well … gee! … OK … six games … whereupon the Ravens leadership, independently of the NFL and having returned from their harrowing Saturn excursion, kicked Rice out of the ball club altogether. This is especially encouraging when one considers this affair within the context of the Michael Vick / dog-fighting controversy, in which Vick was suspended indefinitely in 2007. It will be interesting to see if the parallel between Vick and Rice holds to the point that Rice, like Vick, gets a second chance to be involved, in some capacity, with professional football. My money says he will, despite the fact that the NFL apparently has a “zero-tolerance” policy toward the abuse of biological organisms the NFL considers to be domesticated animals … like pit-bulls and wives.
By the time this is published – I’m writing this on 9 September – the “Battle of the Elevator” will be old news, of course, not fit even for an ad-libbed Bill Maher monologue riff. We won’t even remember who Ray and Janay Rice are, much less why they were once newsworthy. (Show of hands: before I brought it up just now, who remembered Michael Vick and what he did?) We have apparently arrived at the point where the half-life of sports-figure-abuse stories is even shorter than that of school-shootings-by-young-sociopath-ammosexuals stories – which is to say somewhat shorter than the half-life of the lithium-10 isotope. But there are some enduring lessons to be drawn, nevertheless, lessons that will persist long after the Ray Rice / Janay Rice / “Battle of the Elevator” story has lost its “legs”.
Ravens head coach John Harbaugh
o The ongoing need to address issues of safety in high-school, even junior-high-school, football.
Now, from a rational standpoint which takes into account the vulnerability of adolescent brains and nervous systems to catastrophic traumatic brain injury – to name just one example – and to related cognitive deficits that may manifest in later life as a result of repeated blows to even a helmet-protected head … to someone who adopts such a jejune, bourgeois, drearily “data-centric” attitude of dispassionate analysis, the following question might conceivably occur: If playing football at that age really does involve the possibility of such impairment, perhaps … just maybe … we should consider not playing the game at all, at least for that age group … I mean, isn’t it the functional equivalent of Russian roulette, only with padding, helmets, cheerleaders, and pom-poms? (And as long as we are on the subject of Russian roulette … All the painstaking research into engineering and materials science that goes into developing shock- and concussion-proof football helmets seems more and more to me like developing more efficient Kevlar body armor to protect people who play Russian roulette. Maybe the solution is much simpler: don’t play Russian roulette.) Besides, such a pathologically rational person might continue to reason, At the college level, is there not something contradictory, or at least paradoxical, about spending multiple-dozens-of-thousands of dollars in college tuition and fees to train the intellect of someone, only to bang that finely honed cerebral cortex against others’ similarly honed cerebral cortices – thereby risking the destruction at one end of the college experience of what we are seeking to build at the other? The answer: No, Of Course Not, you … you … Big Ninny! Why? Because the more we bang heads together and risk injury during the high-school and college years, the greater the likelihood will be that, for those tiny-fraction-of-one-percent students lucky enough to graduate and play in the NFL, their capacity to empathize with NFL players’ wives will be enhanced! (And this is to say nothing of guys they may get into bar fights with and incidents of road rage. And pit-bulls. And little kids.) They will feel others’ pain because they will already know what it’s like to be banged around, and that experience will have such an impact on them … so to speak … that the prep-and-college machine will turn out fewer guys like Michael Vick and Ray Rice. Bottom line: bang enough guys around on the gridiron in high school and college, and, in several generations, a thousand flowers may bloom! If not … well … that’s just the way the old occipital bone crumbles!
In fact, if we really wanted to turbocharge this strategy, we should probably take a page or two from the playbook of The Hunger Games saga and, prior to each high-school and college football game, make the players compete for equipment: helmets, shoulder pads, thigh pads, cleated shoes, teeth protectors, etc., etc. Issue them foam-rubber “Nerf” weapons – we don’t want them injured before the game, after all: people have paid good money for tickets! – and have them engage in faux combat for their equipment just like the “tributes” in the Games engaged in real combat for theirs. Hey, don’t laugh! It worked for Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark. At least, I don’t recall Peeta right-upper-cutting Katniss and hauling her unconscious out of an elevator! Just sayin’ …
Hay-yull’s Bay-yulls! If you want a label for this methodology, call it homeopathic medicine!
o The role of sports fans, specifically NFL fans, in all the above
On this matter, I can only speak from the standpoint of an interested but personally detached bystander, because I am not a sports fan. (The last time I got really excited about any kind of professional sport was in 1995 when the Mariners were in serious contention to go to the World Series, and I saw Joey Cora weeping when such dreams went for naught.) Aside from the fact that I resemble a basketball more than a basketball player, I am at least as skeptical of professional sports as I am of religion, largely because in most cases there is very little difference between the two. (Try being indifferent to football in Texas, especially rural Texas. Now try being an atheist in John Calvin’s Geneva. Note the similarity.) Both trade on emotion at the expense of rationality and tend to abdicate responsibility at the altar of personality cults. But I can read and do math pretty well, and I also know that both religion and sports run on the fuel of money. If you want to know what your ticket and sports-team merchandise money goes for, try looking – actually, I doubt that you can – at Michael Vick’s legal fees. Ditto Kobe Bryant’s. Ditto Pete Rose’s. Ditto Barry Bonds’. If Janay Rice had filed an abuse complaint against Ray, and Ray had had to mount a legal defense, we could have counted that, also. Only Mrs. Rice’s forbearance prevented that. And, apart from the Rose and Bonds allusions, I have not even ventured into the fraught territory of drug / steroid abuse and medical malpractice. That is what fans’ ticket and merchandise money really buys. And affairs will not change until the Niagara of money dries up and stadium seats cool for want of butts to warm them. The free market that conservatives extol, virtually to the point of believing that it can do no wrong, is profoundly amoral, obeying only George F. Will’s celebrated, and entirely accurate, maxim: You always get more of what you subsidize. You get the kind of culture you pay for, or as Somebody-Or-Other … I forget just Who … said long ago “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be, also”. So if you pay money for pro-sports tickets and merchandise, while nevertheless claiming to be repelled by the spectacle of Ray Rice brutalizing his young fiance, you have no room to complain. You paid for it. You got it.
But by way of compensation, you acquire the sublime comfort of knowing that you are a big athletics supporter.
Sharon Creeden has been my good friend for thirty years.
She was a King County prosecutor, a right-brained person in a left-brained world. I would describe her as a person with one toe deeply rooted in the earth, and an ear bent toward Heaven. No wonder she left law, and went on to become an acclaimed storyteller and author. Fair is Fair: World Folktales of Justice was awarded the American Folklore Society’s Aesop Prize, as well as a Storytelling World Award.
Her brilliant anthology, In Full Bloom: Tales of Women in Their Prime (foreword by Naomi Baltuck!) is well known in the storytelling world.
But at heart she has always been a poet, and a visual artist.
Sometimes both at once. Her work, Generations, is a collage featuring a vintage photo of four generations of the women in her family. Having grown up in Kansas, Sharon chose to include the quilt pattern called “Kansas Troubles.”
On the back of this piece–and at the heart of it– you will find her poetry.
Writers, poets and artists, teachers, mothers and grandmothers…hell, everyone occasionally needs a boost.
I am fortunate to know creative people with whom I can retreat and reenergize.
To share ideas…
To feed our spirits…
To get the creative juices flowing.
To create a quiet space to write….
…and write…
…and write.
Whatever it takes!
Last week I felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the next writing project I have committed myself to. Sharon said, “Before dawn this morning, I was stewing about my resistance to starting a new painting and was reading Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of ARTMAKING. And this poem came:
I am more than the sum of dried paint tubes and stacks of attempts and tries. I am the breath of color on canvas, I am the vision of something never before. I am the incessant urge of “one more time”.
Sharon transported me from that space of uncertainty. I felt cradled and spooned by the good women in my life. I felt bound not by blood and bone, but by our passion for language, story, and the incessant urge of “one more time.”
At the age of one, going on two, telephone calls from my granddaughter, three or four years ago, for a while became a fairly regular as well as welcome and enchanting occurrence. One such call prompted me to write this response.
It addresses that stage in a toddler’s life when they seem to be striving to develop their language skills to communicate with their adult family, but cannot find the words. So I, would pick up the the phone when she called, find myself (like a typical stupid adult) doing too much talking, trying, as we do, to encourage her to say more. What comes back the other way, not surprisingly having been patronised by her grandpa, is mostly silence accompanied by (and this is the truly enchanting bit) mutterings, sing-song tones and breathing, which only fuel my imagination, which rapidly, but mostly unsuccessfully, tries to figure out what it is she is trying to say. The particular phone call to which “Not Talking” is the response was in fact received by our answer phone messaging system, hence I was able to record it for posterity.
Our desire to help them talk can, of course, be dimmed once their newfound ability to talk leads to incessant nattering, which drives us in search of refuge!
But they will always remain an enchantment on our lives and a potential for renewal of our own childhood hopes and dreams.
Not Talking
You called; it seemed from somewhere far away.
You called to say hello in your sweet way.
Not so much with news but how you’re feeling;
our talk, not so much an open book as freewheeling.
You called to say your Dad was making tea;
that, whilst you wait, you’d make a call to me.
An inner smile grew as I listened on
to silences between the phrases of your song
that comes from somewhere in your life, so full
of carefree energy and zest, that you just pull
me with you and, yet, wherever it is you go
metaphysically, little do you know
how much it is you say to me, not talking
of all of your imaginings, while walking,
or perhaps you’re standing, hearing me,
whilst you contemplate what is for tea.
Whatever it may be that you are thinking
I know you’d love to talk and, in a blinking,
you will, and I’ll be thinking: are we blessed
or will we ask, politely, for you to rest?
The BeZine 