Alina's Adventures

The rise of forced birth and the shame of female bodies.

I stand by my choices and honor the choices of others.

I didn't want to write a book about miscarriages, terminations, adoptions, trafficked bodies, and pregnancy-- but I could not stop. The stories kept coming. 

My home state of Alabama is a hub for gun rights, recreational violence, and misogynistic billboards that strip the personhood of women. It comes as no surprise:

Bei Bei Shuai, 34, has spent the past three months in a prison cell in Indianapolis charged with murdering her baby. On 23 December she tried to commit suicide by taking rat poison after her boyfriend abandoned her.

Shuai was rushed to hospital and survived, but she was 33 weeks pregnant and her baby, to whom she gave birth a week after the suicide attempt and whom she called Angel, died after four days. In March Shuai was charged with murder and attempted foeticide and she has been in custody since without the offer of bail.

- The Guardian

A female body is punished for failure to make her body a good house. Meanwhile, in Alabama and all across this country, corporations secure more rights to dump and damage the environment, to poison the groundwater that causes birth defects and countless cancers, to get away with mangling fetuses and sickening children leaving citizens powerless. Power-less. Unable to stop them. 

Why are the crimes of the rich being leveraged against the bodies of the poor? 

Why should anyone pledge their allegiance to a flag that represents the reign of bad stewardship and lack of corporate accountability?

National Advocates for Pregnant Women’s one-of-a-kind study identifies hundreds of criminal and civil cases involving the arrests, detentions and equivalent deprivations of pregnant women’s physical liberty that occurred between 1973 and 2005, after the decision in Roe v. Wade was issued. In each of the 413 cases, pregnancy was a necessary element and the consequences included: arrests; incarceration; increases in prison or jail sentences; detentions in hospitals, mental institutions and drug treatment programs; and forced medical interventions, including surgery. Data showed that state authorities have used post-Roe measures including feticide laws and anti-abortion laws recognizing separate rights for fertilized, eggs, embryos and fetuses as the basis for depriving pregnant women – whether they were seeking to end a pregnancy or go to term – of their physical liberty. The findings make clear that if so called “personhood” measures are enacted, not only will more women who have abortions be arrested, such measures would create the legal basis for depriving all pregnant women of their status as full persons under the law.

The study found in a majority of cases, no adverse pregnancy outcome was reported and that where an adverse outcome was alleged, state authorities were typically not required to provide expert testimony or scientific evidence to prove that the pregnant woman’s actions, inactions, or circumstances would or in fact did cause the alleged harm.

The study documented cases in which fear of arrests and forced interventions deterred women from seeking help for themselves and in some cases for their newborns. These findings are consistent with the medical and public health consensus that punitive measures, and the legal arguments supporting them, will undermine rather than further state interests in child, fetal, and maternal health.

This study found that far from protecting patient privacy and confidentiality, professionals in the health care system were often the people gathering information from pregnant women and new mothers and disclosing it to police, prosecutors, and court officials.

National Advocates for Pregnant Women

I am a mother like any other shuffling between head lice and heart ache. Nothing about this choice is easy or predetermined. Every step we take is a gift and a source of wonder. 

If you'd like to hear voices tied to wombs, consider picking up a copy of Stories to Read Aloud to Your Fetus, my hybrid poetry collection published by Finishing Line Press. 

Love, always, Alina.

Claire Datnow's wonderful, Alabama-based eco-mysteries for middle schoolers.

Pond Slider Turtle, Limestone Park, Alabaster
(photo taken Boris Datnow at bioblitz in Alabaster, Alabama)

At the Alabama Writer's Conclave last month, I had the exciting opportunity to attend a workshop on eco-Mysteries and ecological fiction sponsored by the amazing Claire Datnow. I learned about how her love for Alabama's ecology led her to write eco-fiction for middle-schoolers in order to empower, inspire, and educate them about ecological principles. And then I bought all the books in the Adventures of the Sizzling Six for my children.

The first book in this series, The Lone Tree, is only $2 on kindle and $7 for print. Here's the synopsis:

They thought it was going to be a boring summer. It wasn't! When six determined teenagers decide to save a magnificent old white oak their adventures begin. Can they save their tree and the animals living in it? Will they get to build their secret hideout in its great branches? What could go wrong? The Sizzling Six will have to reckon with a ticked off neighbor on the city council, an unusual teacher, a thickheaded bully and his ditzy girlfriend, a mysterious dreamtime eagle, and an awesome night bat.

Given the extent to which young people (especially young females) are bombarded with advertisements and media which celebrate looking "cute" and trying to "make boys like you", Claire's fiction provides a counter-narrative in which the heroines are driven by eco-fascination and the desire to preserve something they love. 

Because what Claire writes is not likely to be bestseller Y.A. material, we have to ask ourselves more about this amazing woman that spends her time reaching out to Alabama's youngest citizens. Claire in her own words:

Born in South Africa, I immigrated to the US having lived in California, Minnesota, Alabama and Canada. I am a mother, grandmother and wife, and my family is the core of my life. All that I see, feel, experience feeds and inspires my writing. What I have learned in college and through wide reading informs my writing. I earned MA degrees in education of the gifted and talented, and in public history.

The series of YA Eco mysteries for 4-8 graders, The Adventures of The Sizzling Six, reflects my passion and awe for the natural world. With the trusty aid of Boris Datnow, my technological guru, the third book in the series uses QR codes to transport readers from the printed word on the page to video clips that let readers see and hear what the characters in the story are seeing and hearing! My memoir, Behind the Walled Garden of Apartheid, drew inspiration from a beautiful country scared by the iniquities of apartheid. The Final Diagnosis: What The Autopsy Reveals About Life and Death is a tribute to my husband, an autopsy pathologist. My historical novel, The Nine Inheritors, pays homage to my grandmother and two aunts and all those killed in the Holocaust.

What's next? On my trip to Australia, I found inspiration for the fourth book in the eco mystery series for middle grades, The Adventures of The Sizzling Six: Who Kidnapped The Koala? My newest books are published as Enhanced e-books as well as electronic books.

On her website, Claire offers an incredible amount of resources and activities for home educators. In her words:

Each time I write a new eco-mystery for the series, The Adventures of The Sizzling Six, I am amazed at what I learn about the species central to my story. I have developed this unit to share the excitement of learning with students. It is my hope these lesson plans will inspire them to take action in their own communities, and, ultimately, become wise stewards of the earth’s precious natural heritage.

Feel free to download and print the curriculum unit How to Become and Eco Detective. Lessons can easily be correlated to the Common Core State Standards Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science and Technical Subjects. You can also print up the Role Playing Cards and the Driving Questions for use in your classroom.

I would be honored if you would share your students’ work with me at: [email protected]

Free handouts and teacher activities including Eco-mystery Writing Contest. But my favorite by far is the printable Lessons for How to Write Eco-mysteries, a free printable PDF packet. If you take nothing from this, print a copy of this packet and plan a roam school today. 

Since Max enjoyed Claire's mysteries so much, he did a little email interview with her. I am so grateful that she took the time to answer his questions. 

MAX: Did the oil spill from the Canyon Gulf really happen, or was it based on the Deepwater Horizon spill?

CLAIRE: Indeed, the oil spill in my eco mystery is based on the Deepwater Horizon explosion that occurred on 20 April 2010. NOAA continues to assess the fish, wildlife, and habitat harmed by the spill along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Alabama, and Florida.

MAX: What Functions do Diamondback terrapins have as a keystone species?

CLAIRE: So why all this effort to save one species? If terrapins no longer live in the marsh the eco system will become less stable. These terrapins can be considered a keystone species—if you take them out, certain invertebrate species, like snails, will keep on increasing, and they will eat more and more of the marsh grasses that many other species need to survive. That will cause a shift in the important balance of living things in the eco system.The terrapins help to maintain a healthy salt marsh that is a nursery for crabs, fish, oysters, and a large variety of aquatic life. (Max, you will find the more answers to this question in the eco adventure.)

MAX: Is Shelley Island a real place?

CLAIRE: Yes, the island is based on the site of Cedar Point along the Alabama Dauphin Island marsh where the female terrapins come to lay their eggs in summer. (For more information Google Cedar Point along the Alabama Dauphin Island marsh.)

MAX: Are all your stories set in Alabama? 

CLAIRE: They are all set in Alabama with the exception of The Adventure of The Sizzling Six: Who Kidnapped the Koala, which is set in Australia. The inspiration for that book came while I was visiting my family in Australia.

MAX: Why did you choose southern ecology for the subject of your books?

CLAIRE: To do research for my eco mysteries I need to visit the habit of the species I will be writing about. It’s easier for me to explore Alabama as I live in this state. I also interview and consult with conservationists and wildlife scientists who live in Alabama. 

Claire and her spouse, Boris, are currently traveling in Greenland, Iceland, and Labrador. Anyone who knows Claire imagines her explorations are probably sparking new ideas for eco-mysteries to come. 

I am deeply grateful to Claire for the time she took to speak with me and with Max-- even more grateful for the beguiling, ecological stories she writes, stories I can share with my children to inspire them to be the change they want to see in the world. 

Facebook Author Page

Claire's other eco-mysteries, including one about the Cahaba Lily

That poetry book in the pipelines.

Gnome and the King discuss "is" and "ain't".

I haven't been blogging as much, and I miss it. I miss the soft chorus of voices and faces from around the world. The wisdom of other mothers. The creativity and ingenuity of fellow females.

One big reason for the diminished blogging involves my first poetry chapbook coming out in March. It's called Objects In Vases, and many of you will recognize not my only voice but also, I think, your own inside its pages.

I am grateful for a generous, kindhearted, and (yes yes yes) homeschooling editor, as I am grateful to the publisher, Anchor & Plume, for making this such a beautiful experience in a challenging year.

At first, I wasn't sure whether to blog this book-- partly because I fall prey to the suspicion sometimes that poetry is extraneous, a luxury, an aspect of life we don't need, a facet of leisure. That is what I think.

But it's not what I believe. I know better than my cultural conditioning which tells me poetry doesn't matter. I know the first written history began as poetry and that poetry, whether in the form of psalms or sonnets or lyric, feeds a space in us that no sitcom or self-help book or video game can oblige. A space that is aching to be spoken and engaged.

So this is my first poetry book. It comes from the "wrack" (to borrow from poet, Mary Ruefle) and glory and ruin of homeschooling my children. It comes from the giant slalom of daily married life. It comes from the negotiations between my Alabama self and my native Romanian. It comes from the ordinary and everyday menu of successes and strife. It is a story of what it means to be a female- and a question. It is about you. And me.

I would be honored if you considered sharing it with others. You can pre-order a copy for $9 right now and it will magically appear in your March mailbox, just in time for spring. I will also have a free poem study handout/activity available on this website in late April to use with one of the more lyrical poems from the book. 

Your support means more than I can say. Or write. Please consider supporting other amazing authors featured by Anchor & Plume as well. Thank you. And thank you. For being a face and a name in a world of beautiful stories, a moment on our planet's wild heart.

"Elbows", a poem by Minnie Bruce Pratt.

I've been immersed in a mind-bending book by Alabama-born author and poet, Minnie Bruce Pratt. Titled, s/he, the book explores her life as a fe/male and poet and mother and partner. It is beautiful, heart-wrenching, bone-on-bone stuff. I am so grateful to have discovered her. And for the way in which she expands my love for life and all the variants of the lives we try to lead.

Pratt has two sons from a prior marriage to poet Marvin E. Weaver II which ended in divorce in North Carolina in 1975. She lost custody of her children because the state criminalised homosexual activity at the time.

Without further ado, here is...

 

Elbows

 

Cover your arms.
Don’t let your elbows
show.

That’s what my neighbors
down in Alabama tell
their daughters
so no elbow
plump or thin
tan or pink
will entice others
to passion.

But if I thought
my scrawny, two-toned
elbows would lure you

if I thought
my skinny, sharp-boned
elbows could secure you

I’d flap my arms
like a chicken
like a pea-fowl
like a guinea hen

when next I saw you
honey
I’d roll
up my sleeves and
sin
sin
sin.

Discovering a time when Leonard Michaels lived in Tuscaloosa.

Because I have never read a writer who can put so much tension in a single sentence and call it "prose". While searching for his essays online, I found a passage in Mary Ward Brown's Fanning The Spark: A Memoir, which describes Michaels' sojourn at the University of Alabama. 

All the exquisite writers who have walked along the Black Warrior... what would they recognize of our town if they returned? What unique history have been we preserved in the rush for Progress?

"I’d go mad with concern over semicolons. Conjunctions ruined my sleep. I wanted no needless sound in my sentences. I hated to use adverbs because of the “ly” endings. They seemed like sloopy trailers. They made the sense mushy and weak and artificial. I didn’t want to mean anything beyond what could inhere in the particular limited aural sensation. Idea and sound had to be exactly the same length, or the same density, as if a word could be flesh. That used to be my idea of real writing. Sculptural."

Personal rants aside, here is "The Lost Interview" from The Paris Review as well the relevant local history excerpt:

 

Admiring "The Female Man."

Getting the air ducts cleaned out.

Oh there's nothing quite so titillating and gut-wrenching as a weekend spent re-reading Joanna Russ' The Female Man. It should be required reading for any college freshman literature course. It should be the invisible shield within a backpack to protect young people from the sexual insolvencies of current gender norms. It should be required reading for all parties considering heterosexual marriage.

Let's see... what do I love about it? Well, for one, the familiar parts of the female protagonists' scripted life:

Now in the opera scene that governs our lives, Janet would have gone to a party and at that party she would have met a man and there would have been something about that man; he would not have seemed to her like any other man she had ever met. Later he would have complimented her on her eyes and she would have blushed with pleasure; she would have felt that compliment was somehow unlike any other compliment she had ever received because it had come from that man; she would have wanted to please that man, and at the same time she would have felt the compliment enter the marrow of her bones; she would have gone out and bought mascara for the eyes that had been complimented by that man. And later still they would have gone for walks, and later still for dinners; and little dinners tete-a-tete with that man would have been like no other dinners Janet had ever had; and over the coffee and brandy he would have taken her hand; and later still Janet would have melted back against the black leather couch in his apartment and thrown her arm across the cocktail table (which would have been made of elegant teak-wood) and put down her drink of expensive Scotch and swooned; she would have simply swooned. She would have said: I Am In Love With That Man. That Is The Meaning Of My Life. And then, of course, you know what would have happened.

Janet's story intersects with that of other females. One of my favorite scenes is a luncheon for which I've excerpted the particularly delicious parts:

    I knew most of the women there: Sposissa, three times divorced; Eglantissa, who thinks only of clothes; Aphrodissa, who cannot keep her eyes open because of her false eyelashes; Clarissa, who will commit suicide; Lucrissa, whose strained forehead shows that she's making more money than her husband; Wailissa, engaged in a game of ain't-it-awful with Lamentissa; Travailissa, who usually only works, but who is now sitting very still on the couch so that her smile will not spoil; and naughty Saccharissa, who is playing a round of His Little Girl across the bar with the host. Saccharissa is forty-five. So is Amicissa, the Good Sport. I looked for Ludicrissa, but she is too plain to be invited to a party like this, and of course we never invite Amphibissa, for obvious reasons.
    In we walked, Janet and I, the right and left hands of a bomb. Actually you might have said everyone was enjoying themselves. I introduced her to everyone......
    I shadowed Janet.
    I played with my ring.
    I waited for the remark that begins "Women-" or "Women can't-" or "Why do women-" and kept up an insubstantial conversation on my right. On my left hand Janet stood: very erect, her eyes shining, turning her head swiftly every now and again to follow the current of events at the party. At times like this, when I'm low, when I'm anxious, Janet's attention seems a parody of attention and her energy unbearably high. I was afraid she'd burst out chuckling. Somebody (male) got me a drink.

A ROUND OF "HIS LITTLE GIRL"

SACCHARISSA: I'm Your Little Girl.
HOST (wheedling): Are you really?
SACCHARISSA: (complacent): Yes I am.
HOST: Then you have to be stupid, too.

A SIMULTANEOUS ROUND OF "AIN'T IT AWFUL"

LAMENTISSA: When I do the floor, he doesn't come home and say it's wonderful.
WAILISSA: Well, darling, we can't live without him, can we? You'll just have to do better.
LAMENTISSA (wistfully): I bet you do better.
WAILISSA: I do the floor better than anybody I know.
LAMENTISSA (excited): Does he ever say it's wonderful?
WAILISSA (dissolving): He never says anything!

What starts out as a pristine pink filter...
[Yes, work with me on the metaphor here]

A handful of pages later, Janet and/or/plus Joanna enjoy an interaction with your average male. I like Joanna's use of italics to switch between the self she narrates- the public performance of a female self and the human within. Italics are so frequently overused or mottled in fiction. But not here:

    "But American women are so unusual," said the man from Leeds. "Your conquering energy, dear lady, all this world-wide American efficiency! What do you dear ladies use it for?"
    "Why, to conquer the men!" cried Saccharissa, braying.
   "In mah baby brain," said Janet, imitating quite accurately, "a suhtin conviction is beginnin' to fo'm."
    "The conviction that somebody is being insulted?" said Sharp Glasses. He didn't say that, actually.
    "Let's go," said Janet. I know it's the wrong party, but where are you going to find the right party?
    "Oh, you don't want to go!" said Sharp Glasses energetically. Jerky, too, they're always so jerky.
    "But I do," said Janet.
    "Of course you don't," he said; "You're just beginning to enjoy yourself. The party's warming up. Here," (pushing us down on the couch) "let me get you another."
 You're in a strange place, Janet. Be civil.
    He came back with another and she drank it. Uh-oh. We made trivial conversation until she recovered. He leaned forward confidentially. "What do you think of the new feminism, eh?"
    "What is-" (she tried again) 'What is-my English is not so good. Could you explain?"
    "Well, what do you think of women? Do you think women can compete with men?"
    "I don't know any men." She's beginning to get mad.
    "Ha ha!" said Sharp Glasses. "Ha ha ha! Ha ha!" (He laughed just like that, in sharp little bursts.) "My name's Ewing. What's yours?"
    "Janet."
    "Well, Janet, I'll tell you what I think of the new feminism. I think it's a mistake. A very bad mistake."
    "Oh," said Janet flatly. I kicked her, I kicked her, I kicked her.
    "I haven't got anything against women's intelligence," said Ewing. "Some of my colleagues are women. It's not women's intelligence. It's women's psychology.
    Eh?"
He's being good-humored the only way he knows how. Don't hit him.
    "What you've got to remember," said Ewing, energetically shredding a small napkin, "is that most women are liberated right now. They like what they're doing. They do it because they like it."
 Don't, Janet.
    "Not only that, you gals are going about it the wrong way."
You're in someone else's house. Be polite.
   "You can't challenge men in their own fields," he said. "Now nobody can be more in favor of women getting their rights than I am. Do you want to sit down? Let's. As I said, I'm all in favor of it. Adds a decorative touch to the office, eh? Ha ha! Ha ha ha! Unequal pay is a disgrace. But you've got to remember, Janet, that women have certain physical limitations."
    (here he took off his glasses, wiped them with a little serrated square of blue cotton, and put them back on) "and you have to work within your physical limitations.
    "For example," he went on, mistaking her silence for wisdom while Ludicrissa muttered, "How true! How true!" somewhere in the background about something or other, "you have to take into account that there are more than two thousand rapes in New York City alone in every particular year. I'm not saying of course that that's a good thing, but you have to take it into account. Men are physically stronger than women, you know."
    (Picture me on the back of the couch, clinging to her hair like a homuncula, battering her on the top of the head until she doesn't dare to open her mouth.)
    "Of course, Janet," he went on, "you're not one of those-uh-extremists. Those extremists don't take these things into account, do they? Of course not! Mind you, I'm not defending unequal pay but we have to take these things into account. Don't we? By the way, I make twenty thousand a year. Ha! Ha ha ha!" And off he went into another fit.

Winds up looking pretty nasty.

The man from Leeds discerns a connection between conversing with Janet and possibly mating with Janet. He strikes out to explore this situation while we read what Janet's thinking through italics. 

    "You're a good conversationalist," he said. He began to perspire gently. He shifted the pieces of his napkin from hand to hand. He dropped them and dusted his hands off. Now he's going to do it "Janet-uh-Janet, I wonder if you-" fumbling blindly for his drink-"that is if-uh-you-"
    But we are far away, throwing coats out of the coat closet like a geyser.
    Is that your method of courtship!
    "Not exactly," I said. "You see-"
    Baby, baby, baby. It's the host, drunk enough not to care.
    Uh-oh. Be ladylike.
    She showed him all her teeth. He saw a smile.
    "You're beautiful, honey."
    "Thank you. I go now." (good for her)
    "Nah!" and he took us by the wrist "Nah, you're not going."
    "Let me go," said Janet.
    Say it loud. Somebody will come to rescue you.
    Can't I rescue myself?
    No.
    Why not?
   All this time he was nuzzling her ear and I was showing my distaste by shrinking terrified into a corner, one eye on the party. Everyone seemed amused.
   "Give us a good-bye kiss," said the host, who might have been attractive under other circumstances, a giant marine, so to speak. I pushed him away.
    "What'sa matter, you some kinda prude?" he said and enfolding us in his powerful arms, et cetera-well, not so very powerful as all that, but I want to give you the feeling of the scene. If you scream, people say you're melodramatic; if you submit, you're masochistic; if you call names, you're a bitch. Hit him and he'll kill you. The best thing is to suffer mutely and yearn for a rescuer, but suppose the rescuer doesn't come?
    "Let go,____________________," said Janet (some Russian word I didn't catch).
    "Ha ha, make me," said the host, squeezing her wrist and puckering up his lips; "Make me, make me," and he swung his hips from side to side suggestively.
    No, no, keep on being ladylike!
   "Is this human courting?" shouted Janet. "Is this friendship? Is this politeness?" She had an extraordinarily loud voice. He laughed and shook her wrist.
    "Savages!" she shouted. A hush had fallen on the party. The host leafed dexterously through his little book of rejoinders but did not come up with anything. Then he looked up "savage" only to find it marked with an affirmative: "Masculine, brute, virile, powerful, good." So he smiled broadly. He put the book away.
    "Right on, sister," he said.
    So she dumped him. It happened in a blur of speed and there he was on the carpet. He was flipping furiously through the pages of the book; what else is there to do in such circumstances? (It was a little limp-leather-excuse me-volume bound in blue, which I think they give out in high schools. On the cover was written in gold WHAT TO DO IN EVERY SITUATION.)
    "Bitch!" (flip flip flip) "Prude!" (flip flip) "Ball-breaker!" (flip flip flip flip) "Goddamn cancerous castrator!" (flip) "Thinks hers is gold!" (flip flip) "You didn't have to do that!"
    Was ist? said Janet in German.
   He gave her to understand that she was going to die of cancer of the womb.
    She laughed.
  He gave her to understand further that she was taking unfair advantage of his good manners.
   She roared.
   He pursued the subject and told her that if he were not a gentleman he would ram her stinking, shitty teeth up her stinking shitty ass.
   She shrugged.
  He told her she was so ball-breaking, shitty, stone, scum-bag, mother-fucking, plug-ugly that no normal male could keep up an erection within half a mile of her.
   She looked puzzled. ("Joanna, these are insults, yes?")
  He got up. I think he was recovering his cool. He did not seem nearly so drunk as he had been. He shrugged his sports jacket back into position and brushed himself off. He said she had acted like a virgin, not knowing what to do when a guy made a pass, just like a Goddamned scared little baby virgin.
   Most of us would have been content to leave it at that, eh, ladies.
   Janet slapped him.
  It was not meant to hurt, I think; it was a great big stinging theatrical performance, a cue for insults and further fighting, a come-on-get-your-guard contemptuous slap meant to enrage, which it jolly well did.
    THE MARINE SAID, "YOU STUPID BROAD, I'M GONNA CREAM YOU!"
    That poor man.
   I didn't see things very well, as first off I got behind the closet door, but I saw him rush her and I saw her flip him; he got up again and again she deflected him, this time into the wall-I think she was worried because she didn't have time to glance behind her and the place was full of people-then he got up again and this time he swung instead and then something very complicated happened-he let out a yell and she was behind him, doing something cool and technical, frowning in concentration.
    "Don't pull like that," she said. "You'll break your arm."
    So he pulled. The little limp-leather notebook fluttered out on to the floor, from whence I picked it up. Everything was awfully quiet. The pain had stunned him, I guess.
    She said in astonished good-humor: "But why do you want to fight when you do not know how?"
    I got my coat and I got Janet's coat and I got us out of there and into the elevator. I put my head in my hands.
    "Why'd you do it?"
    "He called me a baby."
    The little blue book was rattling around in my purse. I took it out and turned to the last thing he had said ("You stupid broad" et cetera). Underneath was written Girl backs down-cries-manhood vindicated. Under "Real Fight With Girl" was written Don't hurt (except whores). I took out my own pink book, for we all carry them, and turning to the instructions under "Brutality" found:
    Man's bad temper is the woman's fault. It is also the woman's responsibility to patch things up afterwards.

Mark your calendars for the First Annual East Alabama Book Festival.

 

On Sunday, October 18th from 1:00 to 6:00 pm, The Gnu's Room is hosting the First Annual East Alabama Book Festival at Town Creek Park in Auburn, Alabama.

The Festival will feature authors, publishers, local original music, vendors and more! Co-hosts for the event are the Southern Humanities Review and The Republic of East Alabama Artists + Makers. The event is FREE and open to the public.

They are issuing an invitation to authors who wish to have booth space to promote their work and take part in a short reading, as well as to publishers and literary arts related non-profits and others. Booth space is somewhat limited and is first come−first served. Reading slots will be available in a like manner.

The deadline for participation is October 1, 2015. They need your registration form and donation of $20 by that date to hold your spot. Non-profit booth space requires no donation, but they will still need a registration form to save your spot. Bring your own booth- or, as is the case with most of us, bring your own table and chairs.

Town Creek Park is located at 1150 S Gay Street, Auburn, Alabama 36830. Parking and restrooms are available at the Park. A covered pavilion will be utilized for author readings, announcements and musical performances. Bring your own lawn chairs, umbrellas, and blankets. There will be food trucks, local coffee vendors, and various other goodies.

gumdrops

Registration forms and additional info 
More about how The Gnu's Room serves the community
How you can help a nonprofit/bookstore
The Republic of East Alabama (formerly the Revelator)
"It's A Sin to Mock A Mockingbird" by William Cotter
Cole Bryant's graphics 
Auburn Witness Poetry Prize 
Marjorie Rommel, Auburn's Poet Laureate
aaaand...
the superduper philosophy-prof-turned-poet, Kelley Jolley, who marked my papers in bright red ink and thereby earned my eternal favor

The Gnu's Room is located at 108 S 8th St, Opelika. You can speak with a fellow mammal most days at 334-705-048.

Nodding while reading Nikky Finney's interview.

Water riffling off Montezuma Road.

Nikky Finney grew up in the South, and graduated from Talladega College in Alabama. She was "always trying to say the really hard thing in as beautiful a way" as she could.

As a child, Nikky thought art should consist of "the hard to say things and the beautiful things." In a seamless recent interview with AWP's magazine, she describes the influence of a 7th-grade teacher who required students to memorize poems, and the intimacy she developed with language after learning "poems by heart":

....Because then I had the ability to do something no one could really take away from me. The library could take the book back. My mom could say 'Go to bed' at night. But I could keep the poem so close? Something changed when I was able to do that.

I think of the phrase "to learn by heart", and how, over time, it becomes becomes "to know by heart." The words become a form of deep, inner knowledge, their significance imprinted on our hearts and minds.

The words a form of power or currency with the spirit. Words we can use as rhythms while walking. Words we can imagine while folding laundry. Words we can sing in the Birmingham city jail. Words we can use to encourage and resuscitate broken spirits (the verses of We Shall Overcome, for example). Words we can revive as lullabies to chase distant sleep. Words no one can take from us or discredit. Words that become treasures.

Watching the anglers upstream at Montezuma.

Nikky uses poetry as a vehicle for historical reconsolidation and self-discovery. Why, for example, she cannot reconcile polite manners and convention with integrity, and how she learned this. She refuses to dance with Strom Thurmond, in her words:

I have to remember this moment because in the remembering of this moment is what I'm saying about memory: we must save what we know so that we don't repeat mistakes from the past.

An excerpt from the poem, "Dancing With Strom,":

History does not keep books on the

handiwork of slaves. But the enslaved

who built this Big House, long before

I arrived for this big wedding, knew

the power of a porch.

 

This native necessity of nailing down

a place, for the cooling off of air,

in order to lift the friendly, the kindly,

the so politely, the in-love-ly, jubilant,

into the arms of the grand peculiar,

for the greater good of

the public spectacular:

 

us

giving us

away.

What we see is limpid motion.

She cites Toni Cade Bambara as a seminal influence on her writing life. Toni's house was a wreck of stacked dishes and clutter- no counter space, books piled into towers along the wall and floor- but her desk was absolutely bare- "meticulous"- apart from what she was writing at the moment.

This example of how a female rearranged her life to invite writing, living to write rather than to clean or decorate, encouraged Nikky. Toni warned, "You'll never have time to write...So therefore you must make time." 

Nikky is/was child who does not resent her view from the margins because she doesn't believe (or much care) what others make of her. The limits other people impose on her as a black female are limits Nikky does not accept or take seriously. She always felt like an "outlier"- and preferred it:

....being in the margins for me does not mean I feel marginalized. It gives me an edge. It gives me a precipice. A vantage point.

In a sense, it also gives her a place from which to fall. Leaving the South after college was terrifying, Nikky says, until she began to grow out of her "terror" and into her "curiosity". 

I have to drop the seed in the ground so it grows from wherever I've been.

Unlike other American poets, Nikky believes history cannot be silenced. She is a witness to the voices of the present- and this emerges as a thread between lines and pieces. She engages inexplicably tragic characters- those stunted by history from moving forward- including a suite inspired by the ontological quandary that is Condoleezza Rice. (Steve Earle's "Condi, Condi" comes to mind.)

For Nikky, history is the story some people get to tell about what happened. Her poems challenge the received wisdom and "historical truth" by enlarging the lens through we envision what happened. In a Zinnian fashion, she adds the overlooked voices to enrich the history we tell and sell to one another. I love her for that.

As the child of political defectors raised on white-bread southern patriotism, I find my political and poetic commitments do not reside in separate spheres, and though I admire writers fortunate enough to compartmentalize, we must acknowledge the ability to write outside politics is a specious sort of privilege. Perhaps, even, a fashionable muzzle.

 

NIKKY FINNEY, THE PERSON

The Beauty and Difficulty of Nikky Finney (NPR)
Excerpts and readings from Head Off and Split (National Poetry Foundation)
"Questions of Faith", an interview (Poetry Society of America)
"So I Became A Witness" interview (Sampsonia Way)

"Heart, Truth, and Justice" interview (Lambda Literary)
National Book Award Acceptance Speech (YouTube)

 

HER POETRY 

"He Never Had It Made" (US Library of Congress)
"The Girlfriend's Train" (Soul Incites)

"The Blackened Alphabet" (The Bottom of Heaven)

"Making Foots" (The Poetry Center at Smith College)

"The Aureole" (Feministing)

"Red Velvet" (Except In Dreams)

"The Greatest Show On Earth" (Punch-In-The-Face Poetry)

"Sign Language" (The Poetry Center at Smith College)

"A New Day Dawns" (Moving Poems)

"Sam I Am" (Huffington Post)

"Hate" (Project Muse)

"The Clitoris" (Structure and Style)

"Heirloom" (Academy of American Poets)

"Sex" (The Poetry Center at Smith College)

Pessoa and Castaneda on socializations.

Gnome and Grandma Vicki at Lake Tuscaloosa.

CARLOS CASTANEDA: "The trick of socialization is to convince us that the descriptions we agree upon define the limits of the real world. What we call reality is only one way of seeing the world, a way that is supported by social consensus."

Prophet and the Eldest pose for piano recital photos.

FERNANDO PESSOA:"Civilization consists in giving an inappropriate name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality. The object really does become other, because we have made it so. 

We manufacture realities. We use the raw materials we always used but the form lent it by art effectively prevents it from remaining the same."

A table made out of pinewood is a pine-tree but it is also a table." 

We sit down at the table not at the pine-tree…"

Papanasi, a Romanian recipe for dumplings, and Norman Manea.

Gnome samples papanasi, a traditional Romanian food.

Whenever my Aunt Sanda visits, she and Bunica collaborate in the kitchen to create all sorts of Romanian foods that Bunica doesn't cook so much anymore. It's exciting because it reminds me of my childhood, when Romanian recipes were all my mother knew (she hadn't quite learned to cook American yet) and so tripe soup or tongue soup (the dreaded dishes) might pop up any night of the week.

Papanasi can also be eaten as entree without sugar.

A paper bird gifted to us by Bunicu hangs above the dining table.

I sit at the table and write beneath a strange bird. 

It's hard for me to get away from the Romanian evocations in my writing- partly because the mist of childhood makes them feel like legends, fairy tales, impossible things once believed as backdrop for everything else around me. Sanda has been teaching the kids Romanian phrases and it's a reminder I should be doing the same- that I shouldn't abandon my first language. Or leave it to history.

I've been inspired so much by Romanian writers, currently including but not limited to Dimitri Tsepeneag, Mircea Cartarescu, and Norman Manea. I love how Manea describes writing in this excellent interview with Norman Manea in American Reader:

“You write in order to redeem yourself partially from the chaos which is around you, you’re trying to find something, meaning, somewhere. Or to invent one, if you don’t find it—and this is what produces art generally: this need of the individual to search for something which is beyond their reality, even if it is sometimes hidden within that reality.”

Portrait of Manea sourced from an interview with The Daily Beast.

He admits to writing for readers in a closed society:

"My language tried to be faithful to a closed society, rather than an open one. The language was coded, sometimes quite obscurely, and differed greatly from the language of newspapers or party slogans. The characters were usually marginalized—people who were foreigners in their own land."

In the same interview, Manea describes America as “the best hotel”. He shies away from claiming a favorite country:

“A hotel is where you come in, you have a place for which you pay, everything functions, nobody asks who you are or what you want. You have an ID, you give the ID, you come, you go, and that’s it. It’s a domicile and it’s a temporary one because we are temporary here on this Earth.”

There is so much to learn from Manea, who survived both the Nazis and the communists as a Jew and a human being. So much to learn from those who refuse to accept the unacceptable and write their way through the lies society asks them to tell. 

And there is papanasi- the complicated substance and texture of a minority immigrant childhood- that one girl must describe to placate the dead. 

PAPANASI RECIPES TO TRY AT HOME 

Papanasi dessert recipe from Artsy Bites
Papanasi recipe from Cooking Without Limits
Papanasi recipe from Bettina's Traditional Romanian Foods blog

Romanian Orthodox Easter and Marilynne Robinson.

Azaleas and easter eggs at Bunica's house.

Bright red eggs.

The kids dyed eggs with Aunt Sanda. After dyeing, they rubbed bacon grease on each egg to give them a glow. The traditional egg-breaking contest left Prophet on top. 

Gnome eats her egg with mustard.

 

And a thought from Marilynne Robinson's When I Was A Child I Read Books that stayed in my head long after my eyes left the page....

What about us was of interest, if we imagine looking at ourselves in retrospect? That we made civilizations, or that we drove them to the ground, reduced them to rubble? I won't pretend that this is a real question. We  make wealth, and we destroy it. Our wealth is finally neither more nor less than human well-being. There is no necessary hypothesis; there is no value but what we value. The great temptation of money is that it seems to give us token, markers, by which things and people can be truly said to succeed or fail.

Neil Postman's "technopoly."

Gardening days... recovering silt.

Reading Neal Postman helps me resist the constant urge to direct my children towards technology. Though I appreciate the technology which enables me to blog-- and to connect to friends who live over the ocean-- I know it is changing my mind, and altering my perception of the world. So I watch it, and myself, with a healthy skepticism. 

A few interesting excerpts from Postman's Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. We'll start with the underlying (and provocative) premise:

“Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean “ecological” in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates total change. If you remove the caterpillars from a given habitat, you are not left with the same environment minus caterpillars: you have a new environment, and you have reconstituted the conditions of survival; the same is true if you add caterpillars to an environment that has had none. This is how the ecology of media works as well. A new technology does not add or subtract something. It changes everything.” 

 

"With the rise of Technopoly, one of those thought-worlds disappears. Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy.” 

 

“Alfred North Whitehead summed it up best when he remarked that the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the idea of invention itself. We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers—that is to say, as markets.” 

Dogwood blossoms collage.

".... in Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. Some of our priest-experts are called psychiatrists, some psychologists, some sociologists, some statisticians. The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such concepts as sin and evil disappear in Technopoly. They come from a moral universe that is irrelevant to the theology of expertise. And so the priests of Technopoly call sin “social deviance,” which is a statistical concept, and they call evil “psychopathology,” which is a medical concept. Sin and evil disappear because they cannot be measured and objectified, and therefore cannot be dealt with by experts.” 

Stella Radulescu's hallowed memory holes.

Reading Stella Vinitchi Radulescu's I Scrape the Window of Nothingness scooped me out so thoroughly that only scaffolding remained. The scaffolding and the notes jotted down in a sketchbook while crouched on a rock in the arboretum. A sample:

untitled 3

the truth belongs
to those
who never say
good-bye

or lie about
being
here    in love
with falling
gods

Where to begin? I'll begin in the black hole- the place where the literature of dissent abandoned its respect for language. Start with the sparse aesthetic of the political dictatorship, how it led to the absurdism of Eugene Ionesco, the veiled fruits of Herta Muller. What remains after totalitarianism (and utopian propaganda) rendered ordinary words meaningless.  

Now progress to the shores of democracy where people know billboards better than the native plants in their backyards- look around, it's a brave new world and nothing is out of your reach if you're willing (and able) to buy it.

Alas, the hyper-mediated consciousness of consumer culture does not resuscitate language. Perhaps there is disappointment for the political exile upon discovery that democracy honors language by accident- and only on occasion. 

The poet returns to the page with a mistrust of what man creates to make sense of things. No man-made signs can be trusted to offer truth. The words betray as swiftly as clock hands put us at another border, begging to be accepted into another country where only the moon is familiar.

But there are seasons, stars, and particular forms of light by which the world can be known. To read Radulescu is to re-learn geography. To jettison the GPS maps for enfleshed topography. To tell time by what we glimpsed in childhood faces or the heat of a mother's hand. 

lend me your tongue
I buried mine a long time ago
there was no place for such a flame...

And then to hide what we know in our marrow but cannot afford to say- maybe because it fails to signify but really there are no words. No words unmolested.

The scene in Radulescu's poems winds through a distinctly liminal space- the thin skin stretched between light and dark. The space where superstitions are more legible than street signs. The space becomes the place where one expects the epiphany. For Radulescu, the poet's sacred absolutions- the pen, the paper, the attentive expectation- rarely give rise to revelation. She remains alone with a past she can't verbalize and a pen that draws blood without offering us a sentient body.

Other things I found: There are dogwood blossoms but they don't feel green. The flower's sensuality is held back. We are deprived of the resonance by which a bloom holds our attention. There is the ghost of Paul Celan. There is a moon (an eternity of moons). And other characters, or words, which return to re-orient us. There is ice, silence, wind, time, and light. There are eyes, scars, vowels, shadows, children, lovers... 

The visual aspects are not effusive. In this regard, her poems resemble Eastern Orthodox icons more than photographs, oil paintings, or watercolors. Nothing of gouache's tender, wistful touch. The heaviness of holy things- gold foil on wood, the abstracted solemnity of faces who have seen holy things and yet cannot speak of them. The point at which silence morphs into reverence. The point at which she earns my trust.

She brings us to this point again and again and then refuses to go any further. I savor the non-adulatory awe- love the courage of language so bare you can see the swollen joints, the skinny knees knocking together.

Ultimately, what I find in Radulescu's poems is inseparable from what I know about being a Romanian defector: the past is easy to recount but impossible to translate. So I trust the bark of a tree for what it doesn't say. Maybe only a tree is equipped to handle the holy. Maybe the televangelists despise what they cannot touch. 

a poet dying seeks refuge and
sets the page on fire

Radulescu offers her poems to a culture marked by impatience, a culture disinterested in the ineffable. Her courage comes from refusing to cater, pander, or prevaricate. Among my favorites from this book- "1955"; "bells & bones"; "rough winter, cold meals"; "starting point"- emblematic of her voice.

Sketch by George Terry McDonald [source]

I Scrape the Window of Nothingness will be available for purchase on March 12th, but you can pre-order a copy now from Orison Books.

"But why should I do this if you just finished saying Radulescu doesn't offer any revelations or certainties? Why bother if the poems won't fulfill me?"

Because any poet who fulfills you is a one-night stand on the bedside table; and what seems acrobatic at night looks foppish on two legs. Fulfillment is only temporary, a flash in the pan, but the silence of unspeakable things beguiles indefinitely. This is Radulescu's poetic gift- to convey the ineffablility of exile's place and the way language desecrates as much as it preserves. Read her for want of a moon.

"femme bleue" (in French)
"the earth begins" (translated by Luke Hankins)
"night in four voices" (in French)
"flood" (YouTube reading by the author)
"some words suicidal" 
more poems at Orison

Little paper houses on the mantle.

The holiday mantle decorations are packed and put away for next year. Things feel normal again, now that my armless wood statue girl is back in her place beneath the antlers. 

"Why do you love that thing so much?" my husband asked earlier in our marriage. At the time, I didn't have an answer but today the shadow of a reason emerges. I like her because she's not smiling and because she looks as if she's cut from bone. 

A statue carved from bone.... What if death was acknowledged by carving a statue of the each person from their large leg bone? Imagine all the space we'd save only one bone from our bodies was preserved and the rest was donated to hospitals and organ banks. 

The Eldest has been helping Gnome make a paper craft village from the book given to her by Santa this year. Gnome expressed a desire to see her village "grow up" on the mantle. 

Each house has its own set of residents, including pets. Dogs get their own houses but cats are expected to live indoors with their owners.

And here is the book by Delphine Doreau, My Town: A Little World For You To Build. If you aren't sure the book is worthwhile, download a few of Delphine's freebies (posted below) and see if your appetite changes.

Delphine Doreau's Generous Freebies

 Free sample advent calendar house printable
Baby bear wreath printable
Surprise origami wrap printable
Angel ornaments printable
Mini owl paper dolls printable
3-D cuboctahedron puzzle printable
Delphine's dollhouse giftbox printable
Madame Sapin 3-d printable
Black and white matrioshka paper dolls printable
Colorful matrioshka paper dolls printable
Delphine's adorable hanging birdhouse printable
3-D polyhedron ornament printable

Surreptitious daydreams while homeschooling.

While the kids work on their journals, I admire the sunlight and find myself captivated by the conversations of recently-read authors in my head. The motif is a combination of Ellis Island and Atlanta, Georgia, though I don't have any particular story I'm trying to tell about either. 

 The extraordinary grandchildren portrait

SAUL BELLOW: "Though everybody wished to be an American, everybody's secret was that he hadn't suceeded in becoming one."

The extraordinary family portrait.

LISEL MUELLER: "At her wedding, a woman gave up
half of her name
and exchanged it for another.
Half of her is public,
subject to trade; the other
private, treasure and loneliness,
what he thinks of as her ,
what she would share, if she could."

 The King's cross-stitch design and handwork

SAUL BELLOW: "Dreams are readmitted only through the Ellis Island of science, by officials qualified in the legitimate interpretation of dreams. Music we bootleg. We bring it across the threshold surreptitiously."

LISEL MUELLER: "At night, with the lights out
and the TV turned up,  
a woman whispers his secret name:  
it frightens and excites him,
like the hundredth name of God."

 The Eldest recoagulates.

SAUL BELLOW: "When the noise dies down you'll find yourself with the "I" you first knew when you came to know that you were a self-- an event which occurs quite early in life. And that first self is embraced with a kind of fervor, excitement, love-- and knowledge! Your formal schooling is really a denaturing of that first self."

HERBERT LOWENSTEIN: "If you are a poet, I hope you can use language not just as it is, an oily lubricant for the frictionless working of the system."

All family portraits were taken by the talented Wildnei Suane. You can see more of his work online at Willarts and schedule a photo session with him if you happen to be in Atlanta. Because Brazilian photographers rock.

The past year in books and other minds I can't stop mining.

Fiction. Creative nonfiction. Avant-pop. Avant-garde. Dada. 2014 was a year of many events and occasions. Alas, when I look back, it's the books that leave footprints in my mind. The discoveries (and re-discoveries, in some cases) of my year-- not including books for younger people-- some of which disturbed more than they inspired but all of which illuminated dark corners and offered the candlelight's respite.

[A link means the text is available free online.]

A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes

The Notebooks of Malte Lorids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke

The Disappearance of the Outside by Andrei Codrescu

The Shape of A Pocket by John Berger (an annual read)

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

Channels of Desire by Elizabeth and Stewart Ewen

Compulsory Happiness by Norman Manea

Selected Writings by Robert Musil (German Library Edition)

Panorama by H.G. Adler

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay (a must-read)

How to Be Alone by Jonathan Franzen

Light Years by James Salter

Madness, Rack, and Honey by Mary Ruefle

Mother Box and Other Tales by Sarah Blackman

Living Dolls by Gaby Wood

Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression by Robin D. G. Kelley

The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis

The Holy Terrors by Jean Cocteau

The Prisoner of Guantanamo by Dan Fesperman

 Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos and M. Mitchell Waldrop

Different Hours by Stephen Dunn

Fugitive Days: A Memoir by Bill Ayers

Strangers and Sojourners by Michael D. O'Brien

The reading nook... and what we're reading this month.

The time I steal to right usually occurs during reading hour, when the kids read quietly or aloud or (as in the case of Gnome) pretend to read stories and invent them as they turn the pages.

GNOME AND PROPHET ARE READING

Flashlight by Lizzie Boyd
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahaeme
Ladybug magazine
Click magazine
The Iridescence of Birds by Patricia MacLachlan
The Birth and the Death of Stars by Isaac Asimov

THE ELDEST IS READING

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Cobblestone magazine
Dig magazine
Cicada magazine
Doctor Doolitte by Hugh Lofting
Sing Down the Moon by Scott O'Dell
Half A World Away by Cynthia Kadohata
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn

Fact and fiction according to James Salter.

Seed pods are stranger than fiction.

I've revised characters countless times to ensure no one will take offense at possible imputed personal resemblance, but the characters lose their luster and those who might be offended will surely find something else to offend them in my writing. It helps to fall back on the words of the writer I'm currently devouring, and his thoughts on the writing life:

“The notion that anything can be invented wholly and that these invented things are classified as fiction and that other writing, presumably not made up, is called nonfiction strikes me as a very arbitrary separation of things. We know that most great novels and stories come not from things that are entirely invented, but from perfect knowledge and close observation. To say they are made up is an injustice in describing them. I sometimes say that I don’t make up anything—obviously, that’s not true. But I am usually uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling me the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially.” 

[James Salter in an interview with Paris Review]

Rough drafting my way through a poem about lavish noses.

The house comes loose at the hinges when the blue stockings come out...

Author James Salter understood the imperative of a strong nose. His protagonists expressed their inclination towards permanence by virtue of their noses- “a mark of commitment to life” is how Salter described a big nose. The manifest brilliance of a unknown face as apprehended through the nose- the face’s “keel”.

An unfold-able character requires only one physical feature to keep from bending- a strong nose, one which cannot be forced into falseness. The strong nose which remains signals resistance against the cultural prefernences for small noses. The nose’s job being to keep things real, to anchor us to a complicated genetic past.

Not a diminutive nose- not a precious “button” inferior enough for endearment- but an ardent nose, nostrils curved like torches. At least, that's the story I'm trying to tell about why I'm comfortable when told my nose is "massive" or "big" or "interesting" or "Romanesque" or "large" or "buxom", all those words being more affirming than the hidden barb of "your nose isn't THAT big", implying that big is bad. 

The writer's life flush with memory: James Salter's "Via Negativa".

A cairn we found on the intercontinental divide.

There's nothing quite like James Salter for slicing a soul to pieces with a plastic picnic fork. What follows are excerpts from his short story, "Via Negativa", published in the Paris Review.

Salter depicts the well-read writer whose life exists as the failure of having lived a normal life- a life others might allow him to claim. He listens to people argue over his childhood- his favorite poems, hair colors, behaviors- and then lays on the couch as the dishes are cleared. 

They did not hear him. They were arguing about his childhood, various details of it, poems he had memorized, his beautiful hair. What a good student he had been. How grown-up when he ate, the fork too large for his hand. His chin was like his father's, they said. The shape of his head.

“In the back,” his aunt said.

“A beautiful head,” his mother confirmed. “You have a perfect head, did you know that?”

Afterwards he lay on the couch and listened as they cleared the dishes. He closed his eyes. Everything was familiar to him, phrases he had heard before, quarrels about the past, even the smell of the cushions beneath his head. In the bedroom was a collection of photographs in ill-fitting frames. In them, if one traced the progression, was a face growing older and older, more and more unpromising. Had he really written all those earnest letters preserved in shoe boxes together with school books and folded programs? He was sleeping in the museum of his life. 

He marvels over the past of a woman whose body leaves no memory of it. Then he acts destructively, heads onto the night street to clear his head, regain a sense of self surrendered to competing narratives of family life or romance.

In the street he saw on every side, in darkening windows, in reflections, as if suddenly it were visible to him, a kind of chaos. It welcomed, it acclaimed him. The huge tires of buses roared past. It was the last hour of light. He felt the solitude of crime. He stopped, like an addict, in a phone booth. His legs were weak. No, beneath the weakness was something else. For a moment he saw unknown depths to himself, he glittered with images. It seemed he was attracting the glances of women who passed. They recognize me, he thought, they smell me in the dark like mares. He smiled at them with the cracked lips of an incorrigible. He cared nothing for them, only for the power to disturb. He was bending their love towards him, a stupid love, a love without which he could not breathe.

He plays the piano, dreams of driving anywhere else.

In Bach there was not only order and coherence but more, a code, a repetition which everything depended on. After a while he felt a pounding beneath his feet, the broom of the idiot on the floor below. He continued to play. The pounding grew louder.

Stories emerge from chance events, uncomfortable intersections which demand words to move us from one joint to the next.

All is chance or nothing is chance. At dinner Jeanine met a man who longed, he said, to perform an act of great and unending generosity, like Genet's in giving his house to a former lover.

......

“Generosity purifies,” he said. He was later to tell her that words were no accident, their arrangement and choice was like another voice speaking, a voice which revealed everything. Vocabulary was like fingerprints, he said, like handwriting, like the body which revealed the invisible soul, which expressed it.

To be seen for the self that develops rather than the self that other minds (and their memories) make us.

She asked no questions. She recognized him.

Isaac Asimov and I.

Blaze helped out on the mind-numbing
Kansas leg of the drive back from Colorado.

Reading a book of shorts by Isaac Asimov and mourning the lack of similar scientists in our day and age. The short story, “It’s A Job”, gets very tongue-in-cheeky about the toils of being a housewife and how its tasks are self-effacing. I’ve picked up a few tricks and toys from Asimov, among them:

To be called “an idle wastrel”.

To summon one’s two-centimeter alien who goes by the name Azazel and is forced to visit Earth whenever the call should come, usually in a foul mood.

To have, like some on Azazel’s planet, a “klastron”, which must be performed by persons of lower social status in spite of their objections and against their will. 

To be called the “Unpuzzler of the Pulsars”.

Like Azazel, to have originally been drafted as a demon only to be transformed by the editorial discretions of the science fiction genre into an extra terrestrial, a brother from another planetary mother. Likewise, to have replaced magical spells with time warps as a means of summoning Azazel.

To understand that fiction is as stretchy as spandex, allowing you to reinvent your characters or tweak them to fit a specified time and place of your choosing.

To “knock plastic”, placating invisible dryads who tend to be pissed having lost their original homes in oak forests and consigned to factory life and swarming around in industrial vats.

To compare superstition to “Security Beliefs”, the talismans of modern minds, with the understanding that every society believes in magic, or “spirit manipulation”, and that our culture has drafted scientists into the new priesthood, the ones who can manipulate the Cosmos and game the outcomes we prefer.

To understand, with Asimov, why a scientist is no better suited for such a task than a voodoo priest.

To imagine the unintended consequences of such interventions in dynamical systems or what we’ve learned from the study of ecology and ecosystems.

Primitive, unpretty emotions about soil.

Hiking along Snake River on a cloudy day.

"No, I’m no patriot, nor was I ever allowed to be. And yet, the country of my childhood lives within me with a primacy that is a form of love. It lives within me despite my knowledge of our marginality, and its primitive, unpretty emotions.

Is it blind and self-deceptive of me to hold on to its memory? I think it would be blind and self-deceptive not to. All it has given me is the world, but that is enough. It has fed me language, perceptions, sounds, the human kind .... no geometry of landscape, no haze in the air, will live in us as intensely as the landscapes that we saw as the fi rst, and to which we gave ourselves wholly, without reservation.” 

So writes Eva Hoffman, in a book I've read and re-read numerous times. 

On the creation of "nature ghettos".

I picked up Jonathan Evans Maslow's The Owl Papers to help me understand the varying species of owl friends in the woods and trees around our yard. In addition to learning more about our barred owl companions, I discovered a few sad observations about owl species in the state of New Jersey- and how the New Jersey Turnpike and endless development have destroyed the wetland habitats of the previous owl residents.

Maslow introduces his concept of the "nature ghetto", a concept I think is an interesting one to present to kids and discuss as an environmental issue (or even a specific case study). In Maslow's words:

Instead of creating arks to save creatures, we created a new type of ghetto for plants and animals: nature ghettos. As in human ghettos, the strong and selfish survive, the fragile and nonconforming perish. The shy trillium and gentle columbine are rubbed out by the slick poison ivy and tough chicory. The sweet-voiced warblers are muscled aside by the sleazy starlings. At length, phragmites blanketed the marsh pockets, choking out most other plant life. They have proved by far the most tenacious of all local plants, ready to invade any vacant lot or send up shoots between buildings. All you see today are the phragmites' soulless stalkheads, bending to the breezes. 

My curiosity about the mysterious phragmites led me to this well-written handout about Phragmites australis, invasive conquerer of native wetlands. In Newburyport, outdoorsman and conservationists are taking the fight against phragmites in the Great Marsh very seriously. The Nature Conservancy uses helicopters to battle the phragmites along the Platte River. No matter whom you ask, phragmites are a dangerous enemy to local ecologies and plant life. Many environmental groups even go so far as to give phragmites the herbicide exeption.

But it's Jonathan Evans Maslow, a reporter-turned-revelator, that truly inspires me. Beginning as a hometown reporter, Maslow's sense of interest rapidly expanded to include the borderless marvels of the natural world. 

Maslow traveled to Guyana for eight weeks in 1999 on a Sen. John Heinz reporting fellowship to teach environmental reporters how to follow stories that uncovered environmental problems in that South American nation. His curiosity and love for nature led him to receive several Beagle II Awards from Stanford which, in turn, enabled him to write and publish more books about the world which captured his loyalty and imagination.

Searching for Franklin Daugherty and his Isle of Joy.

Franklin Daugherty’s wry Isle of Joy pits boosters against historic preservationists in Mobile. Excellent characterization that brings Lee’s Smith’s sardonic touch to mind, though Smith never manages to create a character as thick as McCorquodale, who admits, “Interior decorating was not leading to my full individuation”. It was one of my favorite books last year- one that situated me squarely within the social status seeking of the Alabama leisured set. 

Publishers Weekly offered the following summary review:

Sexy, iconoclastic McCorquodale de la Rouchefoucauld (the natives say ""Roshfookle""), the niece of a poor woman obsessed with uncovering proof of high-born lineage, is convinced she is ordained to be the savior of postmodernism. When H. Sloane Wolfe, a sexually predatory, socially prominent sexagenarian banking tycoon, falls in lust with her, she determines to parlay his attentions into her own avant-garde sidewalk cafe, which she hopes will be the cornerstone for establishing Mobile as the New World Mecca of postmodernism. Her plans run afoul of a group of nouveau-riche young Rotarian types who hatch a scheme to level the historic district and build a supermall and a ""Six Flags Over Jesus"" theme park. As the new South meets the old South, it's not exactly a case of the barbarians versus the cultured, since just about everyone who has something to say is more pedantic than intelligent. But Daugherty liberally salts his tale with subplots and themes involving greed, petty social ambition, artistic freedom, gay rights and Bible Belt puritanism. Happily, earnest social commentary never gets in the way of vigorous burlesque

The Isle of Joy is a remote southward island discovered in the 1870’s by TC DeLeon, a Jewish novelist and Mardi Gras enthusiast. King Felix III lived on the Isle but undertook an annual voyage to see his Maubilian subjects for three days of “misrule” and set sail at midnight of Shrove Tuesday to return. Much of the plot weaves through the local folklore and self-made mythologizing of the Sunbelt types and "suburban polyps"- the same suburban polyps whose penchant for extensive commuting and strip-mall shopping causes the "proliferation of parking lots" bemoaned by Daughtery's protagonist. 

The real conflict emerges over schemes for downtown revitalization that somehow demand massive expenditures involving the Ten-Tom Waterway. The Tuscaloosa Eastern Bypass- with its plan to build six bridges through a public park dedicated to Hurricane Creek- was not far from my mind as I read this book.

Daugherty makes it clear that "convenience is the code-word", a far cry from the traditionalism espoused by lovers of local history and sustainable farms. The "terrible nightmares of elevated expressways” and “supermall schemes” run far too close to home to keep me from squirming a bit. Like the motto of the Hamburger Harbor Improvement Association (as if any organization with such a name should be allowed the dignity of even the most spurious motto)- “Improve through Improvement”- the thinking of local officials tends to be more directed at fast economic growth (i.e. Progress) than sustainable, long-term development. 

It takes McCorquodale, a hipster debutante intent on radical chic, to rattle the cages of ill-conceived progressive development. When she's not busy debating the "intellectual underpinnings of Mardi Gras”, McCorquodale is offering outlandish solutions to the problem of a glut in growth policy. Take, for example, the possible appointment of a  "Public necromancer” to predict which scheme which scheme on city plan would come to pass. 

Daugherty’s section of the postmodernist “Radical Chic” play that went unremarked until Orville Tidwood of the Baptist megachurch put it in the media as a “moral threat” reminds me of Soapy Jones’ popular showing of “Turn Me On, Dammit” and the scandal which packed the Bama Theatre. Obviously, no one billed the film as a family event. Yet scores of Tuscaloosa citizens found themselves absolutely shaw-ked and a-PAUL-ed to hear of a film with a female protagonist that presumed her right to sexual pleasure paralleled that of her male-gendered classmates. It was a sad day for girls in Tuscaloosa, especially those young girls still struggling to discover and reclaim their sexuality from a world that damns them to being boy-toys rather than individuals in their own rights.

The liberating habits of compassionate men.

During my first pregnancy over ten years ago, I devoured books on the topic of raising boys. As with every new terrain, it made sense to cross-reference the maps made by those who came before me.

The most important conclusion from all my reading and research resulted in the taking of a vow. I vowed never to make the Eldest feel that he was only allowed to be half a human- that half currently recognized as the prototypical American male.

Having best friends that were guys taught me how much men suffered for the way we raise them to be caricatures of angry, sarcastic, beer-chugging brutes with "natural drive" for rape, destruction, and violence. Honestly, I've never met a man who fits the bill- though I've met way too many who lived like zombies for trying.

We treat men like they are naturally too insensitive, ego-driven, violent, and lusty to leave with out daughters. Then we wonder why the number of nuclear missiles in our arsenal continues to rise. The truth is that men and women are born with similar emotional needs and emotional expression.

According to various studies, around the age of four, the average American boys realizes that daddy (and his preschool buddies and favorite cartoon characters) doesn't like it when he talks about feeling sad. "Take one for the team," laughs the dad. Or, "crying is for girls- boys don't cry". Some variation on sarcastic disregard for what a boy is feeling and some form of withdrawal that teaches him to detach himself from any feelings lest he lose the affection and regard of his daddy and male peers.

The word "sad" is quickly removed from a developing boy's emotional vocabulary. But the sad feeling persists. Eventually, he learns that boys are allowed to get angry. He understands that winning makes fear and bad feelings go away. He agrees not to name all the complex congnitive emotional states he can no longer acknowledge. Instead, he does what "big boys do", namely, keep his eye on the prize and aim to win. Whether he is winning a soccer game, a promotion, a card game, a bet, a dare, or one of those emotional objects known as females, his develops only one response to losing- the response of fear and anger. Under these two words, entire worlds are submerged.

Men are not from Mars. Women are not from Venus. Both co-exist as human beings on the planet known as Earth. Books which promise to reveal why men and women can't understand one another usually fall back on the self-fulfilling prophecy of claiming that women are super-emotional and have emotional needs, while men are rational and lack complex emotional needs. Seriously, sitting in the stands of a college football game will quickly reveal the extent to which men and women are equally irrational and equally emotional.

Rarely do such pop psychology books acknowledge the cause for these differences is not God or "nature" or interplanetary travel. Rarely do they mention all the scientific studies that show these differences are largely due to the way in which males are socialized to ignore, project, or suppress their emotions. At no point does John Gray admit that male emotional illiteracy is normative but far from natural or even "normal". He's built a galaxy of cash on maintaining the stereotypes that keep men and their partners from being able to live life in its full variety of cognitive colors.

Reading one of my favorite magazines today returned me to the trenches of the old "unemotional male" sophistries. Describing five habits of "highly compassionate men", Kozo Hattori begins with the truth of the past- the early socialization against compassion in a culture that tells men "emotions" are something the other sex does.

Hattori remembers "being a very compassionate child"- the kind that "cried his eyes out" during the film version of "The Little House on the Prairie". By the time he became a young adult, however, Hattori's identity stayed firmly within what he calls the “act-like-a-man box”. Fitting popular conceptions of masculinity failed to equip him with the sort of self-knowledge that enables us to navigate the tight corners of fear and frustration:

Although I was what therapists call “high-functioning,” my lack of compassion was like a cancer that poisoned my friendships, relationships, business affairs, and life. At the age of 46, I hit rock bottom. Unemployed and on the verge of divorce, I found myself slapping my four-year-old son’s head when he wouldn’t listen to me.

At this point, Hattori questioned the self he had become and whether it served the spirit and soul of his body. Like many wise men before him, Hattori started seeking. He began with empathy. After workshops and seminars and hours of meditation, he grew into compassion. Or maybe compassion grew, naturally, from him. Either way, he discovered that the more compassion he felt, the "happier" he became. 

Like anyone who discovers an ineffable and life-affirming truth, Hattori felt driven by the need to share what he had learned and, of course, continue his own journey of learning. So he interviewed a number of individual experts in an effort to determine what, exactly, makes a compassionate man. Or, how a compassionate man is made.   

Interviewees included Dr. Dacher Keltner, co-founder of the UC Berkeley Greater Good Science Center; Dr. James Doty, founder and director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University; Dr. Rick Hanson, author of Hardwiring Happiness; Marc Brackett, director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence; and Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen Buddhist monk nominated by Martin Luther King Jr. for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967.

The conclusions were as simple as the feeling of compassion to an unbridled, open heart:

1. Learn to see compassion as strength.
2. Cultivate compassionate role models.
3. Strive to transcend gender stereotypes.
4. Cultivate emotional intelligence.
5. Practice silence.

Hattori's happiness is contagious. I look forward to his research and encourage him to keep probing the depths, tackling difficult and onerous topics that assist fellow humans in resisting cultural influences against compassion.

The opportunities to make the world a better place for boys and men abound. So, the next time your son honors you by trying to explore and express his complicated heart, dive into the depths with him, rather than forcing him to tread water on the surface. Being born a boy should not relegate you to being less of a human being.

MY FAVORITE RESOURCES ON CULTIVATING COMPASSION

"Can mindfulness help kids learn self-control" by Sarah Wheeler (Greater Good)
"The way we socialize boys man harm them as men", a documentary must-see (All Voices)
"No more Steubenvilles: How to raise boys to be kind men" by Kim Simon (Yes!)
"Boys have become emotionally illiterate" by John Amaechi (BigThink)
"Male and female ability differences down to socialization, not genetics" by Robin McKie (Observer)
"I'm not socializing my kids- I'm humanizing them" by Kimberly Yvette Price (Home Education)
"Nervous Nellies" by Taylor Clark (Slate)
"How to deal with mean people" by Christine Carter (Greater Good)
"His hidden needs" by Nara Schoenberg (Chicago Tribune)
Barbie vs. Batman: The socialization of children's toys (Paula vs. Patriarchy)
"Creating a new generation of compassionate and sensitive men" by Dr. Ted Zeff
"We must look at how we teach our boys what it means to be a man" by Neil Irvin (Time)
"Strong men don't hide their emotions, they show them" by Jack Fischl (PolicyMic)
"The man who couldn't feel" by Contessa Schexnayder (Brain World)
"Helping men to help themselves" by Lea Winderman (APA Monitor on Psychology)
Understanding and Raising Boys (PBS Parents)
Peace In Relationships, Kozo Hattori's blog and counseling 

RELATED STORIES FROM THE CASTLE VAULT

The Eldest's first soccer game.
Why I homeschool.
About love.
Cross-stitching with boys.
Home-schooling and socialization: The heart of the matter.
Is technology narrowing our perception of life?
A date with Adrienne Rich.
Mining a fallow field for stories.
Radical home-makers of all stripes.

A nature walk with Diane Kappel-Smith.

Dutchman's breeches in Dublin, Ohio.

All the recent, rather immediate demands of a growing garden have kept me from reflecting on our trip to Ohio- from mining it for tiny kernels of insight.

But this morning, I found a crack, the kind that swells into a crevice, between the comings and doings.

As the kids worked on their book reviews, I flipped back through the photographs of our nature outings with the writings of Diane Kappel-Smith in the forefront of my mind. In retrospect, posting the photos alongside the text makes me feel as if Diane and I walked the woods together.

It's so much easier to write about the wonder and obvious beauty of nature than it is to acknowledge the extent to which it satisfies and cultivates a craving for fantasy. Surely I am not the only woman to have trudged through muddy trails with Thoreau at my side.

Today, I walk with Wintering in my head. Or, rather, I return and revisit under the electrifying influence of a particular writer who has more to reveal to me in all the things I have seen.

Walk with me. 

"I come back to the papery leaves, the spring beauties, the sun which reaches me here, now, unfiltered. The twigs, leaves, and flowers that are on their way are already formed, were made last summer and packed away in scales and sheaths; all they have to do is expand like balloons, and then their branch tips will begin their hurry to make more."

Diane Kappel-Smith

"Trees grown in the open are thicker of trunk because the wind has blown them, and they choose to thicken in the parts of themselves most stressed by their own bending. Trees in the dense woods where the wood can't push them are thin as wands".

I would make an exception for the dense, heavy hardwoods growing in the Carpathian mountains of Transylvania. Their trunks are as thick as houses, possibly because their location on the side of high altitude mountains demands heftiness as a form of hardiness for the snow-heavy Transylvanian winters and sharp mountainside winds. 

Of course, if American corporations have their way, these old trees will soon be logged to make fancy dining room tables for the rapacious consumers of Hollywood and Aspen. But I hope against hope that something happens to stop them.

BLOODROOT

The large white petals of the bloodroot plant radiate outward, but often only last for one day. One of the ways to recognize this plant is the leaf often looks like it wants to wrap itself around the flower. If you cut the stem or dig the root, it will bleed a bright red-orange juice.

"In these maples and birch and beech the branches reach out year after year, running skyward like the fingers of rivulets when water is poured on dry ground."

Critical Thinking Exercise on Diana Kappel-Smith review (PDF)
A little something I made for the Eldest and wanted to share.

YELLOW TROUT LILY

Trout Lilies like to keep their feet wet and are common, especially along river floodplains. There are both white and yellow species here. The six petals are usually recurved like this. The mottled leaves is a diagnostic character.

I love the way the leaves resemble purple tie-dyed shirts.

A golden goodbye whose shadow is even lovelier than its hue.

How to play the game of "Ergo", the completely free version.

Reading memoirs has the unexpected effect of adding new games to our repertoire. I discovered the game of Ergo in Jeanentte Walls' memoirs, The Glass Castle. It was a game Walls' father invented to play with his kids. All you need is a few players and the ability to communicate.

The word "ergo" means "therefore". I think therefore I am, promised Descartes. But what conclusions- what "therefore"- can we draw from limited information? At what point does a conclusion become an opinion rather than a statement of fact? Playing Ergo explores this dichotomy and encourages players to formulate their own critical thinking strategies.

HOW TO PLAY

To play the Ergo game, someone makes two statements of fact. Each player then has to answer a question related to these two statements of fact. If the answer doesn't follow from the statements, the player must say, "Insufficient evidence to draw a conclusion" and then explain why this is the case.

Here's a few examples that came to mind when the hamsters in my head hopped on their wheels and wouldn't stop spinning this morning. 

Statement 1: Pigs and human beings are the only animals that can get a sunburn.

Statement 2: Some humans eat pigs for breakfast in the form of bacon.

Questions: Do human beings and pigs have the same form of pigment in their skin? (Insufficient evidence to draw a conclusion. We can speculate this as a possibility, but nothing in the two statements discusses what causes sunburn in pigs or humans.) Does the word "pigment" come from the word "pig"? (Insufficient evidence to draw a conclusion. The statements make no reference to pigment.)

If perchance you do play this game with your family or friends, I'd love to hear some of the statements and questions you formulate. 

[Addendum: There's also a card game called "Ergo" in which you seek to prove your own existence while disproving the existence of other players. I need to remember to add it to our wishlists. Family, here's one of those "good gifts" that the entire family would enjoy.] 

Finding the shelter of each other.

I burned the candle reading on the stoop outside our backdoor last night. The biblio-love with whom I communed, Mary Pipher's The Shelter of Each Other, resonated as clearly as the song of the barn own which visits our backyard at least once a week, the barn owl whom I have come to believe is divided between a past which took place somewhere in the woods behind our yard and a present which resides down the street from us. 

The social construction of reality and the idol of Progress

Pipher, like Wendell Berry, dismantles the idol of "Progress" to which so many mega-churches and self-help groups are now dedicated. Just because science advances to give us the atomic bomb does not mean that this technological progress makes the world a better place. Like many, I am in the thralls of this consumer myth in the places where I least expect it.

We are, after all, one of those crazy families that gave away their TV set this year. That's right- we don't have a TV. Our kids are clueless about the latest exploits of Dora the Explorer or the how the Bratz feel about halter tops. 

"Choose your books as carefully as you choose your friends," warns a grandmother in Pipher's book. For a woman who treats her books like lovers, the admonition is clear- my neural pathways are constructed by the books and media to which I am exposed. Ultimately, as an adult, I am responsible for creating the architecture of my own brain. As a parent, I am responsible for protecting and encouraging only the best and least harmless materials in the construction of my children's brains. 

We all have our blind spots. Boys are one of them. Pipher writes about the challenges faced by boys in our mediated culture- the tension between messages given by the media and the voice of their conscience, as nourished in their homes. When a boy tells his parents, "You just don't understand," he is absolutely right. How can we understand what it's like to grow up in a culture that sets a standard of "cool" for men in which scoring is always the goal, whether in sports or in human relationships? How can we honestly confront the mixed messages given by media that glorifies killing without remorse and consuming sex as if it were a supersized McValue meal? How can we unravel the unspoken double standard that tells boys to kill and screw without warning them of the cost, whether jail, pregnancy, or emotional detachment that leaves them lonely, lacking the very friendship and intimacy which led them to try and impress others in the first place?

To confront this mixed messages requires us to admit the ways in we are complicit in their formulation. We tell our boys what is right and wrong, then we hand over the remote or iPad that reminds them the extent to which right and wrong are glorified abstractions and unrealistic expectations. We pat them on the head and refuse to acknowledge the way in which their kindness and empathy will be held against them in peer groups. 

"Gentle boys who respect girls are at best ignored and at worst brutalized," writes Pipher. "To be accepted they must do things that are wrong and harmful", things which their peer groups will encourage and reward yet fail to assist them in coping with the consequences. The problem is compounded by the way in which our culture discourages kids from looking to their parents for help with complicated emotions and needs.

"We don't give teens permission to love their parents.... We teach them there's something sick about being close." 

This is tantamount to denying the deepest and most essentially human need of all- the need to be loved and nurtured, the need to find meaning in the way we relate to one another.

Encouraging fatalism and despair

"There is nothing is new under the sun," we promise, when our children express despair over bullying or the images of dead civilians, mothers with children curled around them, on the television set. So our kids learn to keep quiet about the things that shock them. Rather than empower them with tools to make the world a better place, we establish a rationale for passivity. There is nothing you can do. Life sucks. So keep playing that video game. At least you have a chance of scoring. 

Albert Einstein said that our theories determine what we are capable of observing. Rush Limbaugh doesn't see struggling single mothers trying to juggle two jobs and parenting- he sees only evil, selfish women trying to steal taxpayer dollars. If you listen to Rush Limbaugh, chances are you will see things the same way. Like it or not, he educates you and creates your worldview. He tells you what to think and what to care about. He lights that fuse beneath your bottom that makes you angry every time you see a young man wearing a hoodie. Worst of all, he convinces you that the world is nasty place where the ballots are rigged against anyone who considers themselves an "honest American".

I would argue that anyone who considers themself an "honest American" needs to take a step back and do some critical thinking and deconstructing of the phrase itself. The honest American is the one who admits what his lifestyle costs the world and all the children of developing countries. The honest American is one who repents of any "Americanisms" that allow him to justify the desecration of our natural world and its non-American residents.

To argue that change is inevitable is to say that planning and hoping is impossible. Its serves to deprive us of personal agency and identity, to sweep individuals into a dustpan where all are just undifferentiated dust flurries. Telling your kids that "that's the way the world goes round" as if it were a truism rather than just a funny song equips them with a sense of helplessness in facing life's challenges. 

Offering a rather un-erotic sex education

Rather than provide our kids with a rich, compelling sex education, we skim over the technical details and allow the culture of porn to do "the dirty work" for us. Perhaps, deep down, many of us still believe that sex is dirty, something that contaminates those who speak of it. So children learn to have "McSex", to just do it and get it over with and consume it as quickly as possible. The difference is not so much in the people with whom you do it, but in the presence of specific condiments- ketchup, onions, anal, etc. 

Honestly, are you surprised to see teens discussing sex as if it were banal, blase, and possibly even boring? Pardon my excitement, but if the coolest experience in the world (namely, sex) has become run-of-the-mill, what on earth is left to words to like "yearning" and "longing" and "hope"? I like words that represent feelings based on delayed gratification; they give us something to anticipate; they add texture and richness to everyday life. 

Human development occurs within the context of real relationships. We learn from whom we love.

The poverty of consumerism- that feeling of never quite having enough- commodifies things that might otherwise be created, hand-made, seeded between people and allowed to bloom, grow, and blossom in unspeakably beautiful ways.

We're stuff-rich but oh so very soul-poor.

We're theory-laden and yet still desperate for love. All the books which punish people for living as if we truly loved others- for living our way through our loves- throw us back on the market in search of the next book or pill that might fill in the emptiness.

Cars before conscience

I admire the courage it takes for Pipher to say that character has more influence on our longterm happiness than the momentary notion of "self-esteem". To define "will as the ability to act on the basis of one's values". To bemoan the extent to which "cynicism is king". To point out that most teens see conscience- not a car- as a luxury they can't quite afford. 

I wonder how we got to a place where kids feel more comfortable raising money to help pets or animals than fellow human beings. Have we made human-kind as unspeakably dirty as sex? Have we made it easier to show affection for an animal than a fellow human being? Have we made it harder for young folks to determine what they, as individuals, want as opposed to what they have been programmed to want? Have we extolled human nature above and beyond the power of human nurture? And do we really want to live the sort of world that exists as a result of these choices? 

These are important questions to ask- as individuals, as parents, and as families. Relieving kids of the opportunity to participate in discussions about the challenges posed by our culture only disempowers them. Many of us (myself included) are better at teaching our kids to be rebels than helping them understand precisely what they are rebelling against. 

Prophet brings me a bowl of flowers. I put down my pencil for long enough to remember why those books I take as lovers must remain, somehow, as side shows to the real show that unfurls everyday in our home.

In a world that tells us it is "safer not to care", the most daring thing we can possibly do is keep caring. And teaching our children to care, in spite of the cost to their "cool factor". If life is worth living, it must be worth engaging. We must agree to fight battles we can't possibly win just because it is the right thing to do. We must agree to be enthralled and delighted. Perhaps these are the best lesson to impart from our temporary, fragile nests.

Will D. Campbell, a man unlike any other.

The first time I heard Will D. Campbell's name was in the context of a conversation with an elderly neighbor whose voice churned confetti and fireworks as she described her favorite "bootleg preacher". I was intrigued- but all that breastmilk-induced oxytocin erased the name from my memory until I ran across it again while reading a book of conversations with Walker Percy. And then again when researching the life of Clarence Jordan.  

Like Clarence Jordan, Will knew what he was up against in racism- a form of excusable disgust and hatred which preachers sought to justify using scriptures and traditions. For Will, it would not be enough to decry the hatred for other races. Instead, he would have to learn to love even the most unlovable human beings.

"I have seen and known the resentment of the racist, his hostility, his frustration, his need for someone upon whom to lay blame and to punish," Campbell wrote in his first book, Race and the Renewal of the Church. 'With the same love that it is commanded to shower upon the innocent victim of his frustration and hostility, the church must love the racist" Therefore, in 1969, on the night before Bob Jones, the Grand Dragon of the North Carolina KKK was shipped off to federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, for contempt of Congress, Campbell was there in the Dragon's Den to celebrate communion with a bottle of bourbon. Later, Campbell talked with James Earl Ray, the man who had murdered Campbell's friend Martin Luther King. When people asked if he really expected to save the souls of such men, Campbell allowed that that would be presumptuous: "They might, however, save mine." (Source: Lawrence Wright)

Given his extensive career in the Christian church, Will often surprised people by confessing that his faith came to him much later than his memorization of scriptures. Though a preacher, Will claims he actually became a Christian when his friend, Jonathan Daniel, was murdered in 1966. Daniel had come from his Episcopal seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to register blacks to vote in the notorious Lowndes County. After walking into into a country store with a white priest and two black friends, Daniel emerged holding a Moon Pie and a soda pop. A sheriff's deputy named Thomas Coleman found this Moon Pie to resemble a threat and decided to resolve the matter with the help of his shotgun. Daniel gave his life for the civil rights movement.

When Campbell heard about Daniel's death, he was visiting his friend PD. East, the colorful and defiant editor of the Petal, Mississippi, newspaper called The Petal Paper.

It was East, years before, who had badgered Campbell into giving him a definition of the Christian message in ten words or less. “We're all bastards, but God loves us anyway," East recalled. “Let's see if your definition of faith can stand the test. Was Jonathan a bastard?"

Campbell was still in shock and deeply grieving for his friend. Mainly to get East to shut up, Campbell admitted that Jonathan was a bastard. “Was Thomas a bastard?" East asked. It was easy enough to agree to that.

Then East pulled his chair around, put his bony hand on Campbell's knee and, staring directly into Campbell glistening eyes, whispered, “Which one of these two bastards do you think God loves most?"

This was the turning point in Campbell's life. He describes it in his memoir, Brother to a Dragonfly.

I walked across the room and opened the blind, staring directly into the glare of the street light. And I began to whimper. But the crying was interspersed with laughter.

He was laughing at himself: ”At twenty years of a ministry which had become, without my realizing it, a ministry of liberal sophistication. An attempted negation of Jesus, [a ministry] of human engineering, of riding the coattails of Caesar ... of looking to government to make and verify and authenticate our morality, of worshipping at the shrine of enlightenment and academia, of making an idol of the Supreme Court, a theology of law and order and of denying not only the Faith I professed to hold but my history and my people - the Thomas Colemans."

I never got over Campbell's Brother To A Dragonfly, which I read en route through the entire opus of Walker Percy. Unlike Percy, Campbell didn't need to play dress-up in order to reveal the nakedness of modern man. Like Wendell Berry, Campbell's sense of "place" oriented his characters in a way that is familiar to anyone who was born in Romania and raised in Alabama, between one place and out the other.

Passages like this one found a nook, a place to sit and simmer, in my mind:

I said something about Hitler taking over the world and none of us being free.

"Brother, nobody is free. Freedom is how much you're willing to do to get people to leave you alone."

"And patriotism? That's just something they sold us. How can you love a country? A country is nothing but a big piece of geography. I love that eighty acres of land up there in Amite County where we were raised. But I can't love three million square miles."

As a piece of southern history, Will's book is unsurpassed. It breaks the heart while mending it. Though Will passed away several years ago, his influence continues to ripple outwards. Here are a few selections from those who knew him...

"Rev. Will D. Campbell, Maverick Minister in Civil Rights Era, Dies at 88" (New York Times)
"Bubba to a gadfly- remembering Will D. Campbell" (Ken Carder)
"Reverend Will D. Campbell, southern racial reconciler" (Southern Spaces)
"The first church of rednecks, white socks, and blue ribbon beer" (Rolling Stone)
"The tragedy of the redneck" (Joel Rieves)
"Apostle to the rednecks" (Phillip Yancey)
Brother to a dragonfly (The Contrary Goddess)
"Brother to a dragonfly" (Paul Greenberg)

Kurt Vonnegut and an unexpected tree pose.

One pose amid many.

“I love you, Eliza,” I said.

She thought about it. “No,” she said at last, “I don’t like it.”

“Why not?” I said.

“It’s as though you were pointing a gun at my head,” she said. “It’s just a way of getting somebody to say something they probably don’t mean. What else can I say, or anybody say, but, ‘I love you, too’?”

Kurt Vonnegut, Slapstick or Lonesome No More!

Confessions of a bibliophilic bibliomaniac.

The piles of words rise like mountains, obstacles to climbing out of the bed, or reasons to linger and read my way out. Pausing to touch the jacket elicits the temptation to do more.. to read it, to lose myself in the wranglings of another mind, another place, an alternate time.

I can't wrap myself around a digital book in the same way- can't pause in the margin to inhale the scent of printed words, can't dog-ear my way through places so marvelous that the corners rub off. For one who prides herself on adaptation, the digital book barrier remains impermeable.

Yes, pixellation engages the sense with its brilliant colors and virtual reality. But it's the physical reality of books that I can't trade in for the cool mod version. (Anyone who reads this blog already knows I'm not cool or hip or anything that lends itself to fashion.) What I want is the experience of reading in a way that is sensual, rather than merely sense-driven. I want to touch the pages, run my fingers over the coffee cup marks, find a reason for that mysterious marginalia I must have written long ago. My relationship with the text is tangled up in my relationship with the physical body of the book. It's complicated.

The classic bibliophile is one who loves to read, admire and collect books, often amassing a large and specialized collection. Bibliophiles do not necessarily want to possess the books they adore- only to collect the knowledge of their existence.

But there is a sense in which bibliophilia blurs with bibliomania, which wikipedia defines as "an obsessive-compulsive disorder, involving the collecting of books to the point where social relations or health are damaged, and in which the mere fact that an object is a book is sufficient for it to be collected or loved".

Some use the term "bibliomania" interchangeably with "bibliophily". Wikipedia also claims that the Library of Congree does not use the term "bibliophily," but rather refers to its readers as either book collectors or "bibliomaniacs". Perhaps I am a bibliomaniac rather than a bibliophile- it's hard for me to discern the difference. I love books- love love love them. Ultimately, the moniker used to describe my fascination will probably change sooner than my relationship with the books themselves. Now, back to stacking and sorting and, yes, savoring....

One quick way you can make the world a better place right now.

I had big plans for the weekend- massive plans involving backpacks, a tent, the King and myself narrowed by the weather to still-grandiose plans involving the kids, the road, and a visit to Newbern. Ultimately, the plans were abandoned, replaced by the surprising deliciousness of my husband's Red Cabbage Borscht and those notebooks covered in meaningful scribbles which I keep hoping, one day, to revise in a manner worthy of publication.

 

On the unexpectedly lovely side, we made it to Sunday morning services early enough to warrant a stroll through the budding trees on campus.

As I sit and sift through dinner preparations tonight, even the day's beauty fails to distract me from the sense that there was something I should have done- a tiny kernel within those well-wrapped plans that might have made a difference in someone's life. It's the demise of our planned visit to the Newbern Public Library, a current project undertaken by Auburn's Rural Studio, that sticks in my mind. 

Image of library vision from Rural Studio tumblr.

So I return to the website, calculating a way to squeeze the roadtrip into our planned activities for the coming week. It is gazing at pictures of the work in progress that leads my eye down to a tiny link reading "Newbern Library Wish List". Lo and behold, the possibility of books we can donate to the kids of Newbern suddenly appears on my screen, accompanied by the following request:

Select the "ADD GIFT" option and indicate your name as book donor and/or to whom you wish to honor with this gift. By purchasing from this list, you are helping to found a library collection for the community of Newbern, Alabama. The library organization is recently formed with an emphasis on children's learning. Thank you for your support!

Is it silly that I felt a flood of happiness as I purchased Iggy Peck, Architect from the Newbern Library wish list? Such a tiny, little action- and the opportunity to acknowledge Mr. Peanut's hospitality- whisked the mislaid plans from my mind and returned my mind to the dinner at hand.

Sometimes those extra-big plans of the monumental kind can be husked to expose the kernel, the tiny little seed of action which made the plans so exciting in the first place. The plans were first formulated because I wanted to pay tribute to the Rural Studio students building this library for the kids of Newbern. At the heart of the hope was the way in which the little people growing up in Newbern are being honored by this project. We couldn't drive to Newbern this weekend. Yet I could help build their book collection by purchasing a book from the library wishlist.

Why put off until tomorrow what we can do today? Have a look at the Newbern Library Wish List and see if there is something simple that you can do today- right now, this very minute- to help build the Newbern Library. Get little people involved by encouraging them to pick which book your family should gift or the wording of the gift message. 

AHM #2, a poem by John Bennett.

AHM #2

by Jon Bennett

If I’m going

to be a prisoner

and I am

let me build

my prison

on the ivory plain

of your stomach

in view

of the forest

of your long

brown

hair.

Discovered in the lovely little magazine called Sassafrass. Where I also discovered that Jon Bennett's novel, a spec-fi about autism, is due to be published this year. Where I now have a novel to wish upon.

David Abrams and the narrative shift.

Stopping to gaze upwards for a moment...

Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth – our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

On looking back, barely.

Making crazy critters is good for the soul.

Fly Guy, our first monster critter creation.

We've been making critters this morning with the help of our Paper Craft Crazy Critters book. Acting like a crazy critter is also somewhat appropriate. Here's one way to channel that energy into making the best of things.

"The Crazy Critters" Skit Script (PDF)

Also consider Paper Toy Monsters, another cardboard monster-making book. Mark Fraunfelder has the juice on it.

Thoughts on Mr. Lookadoo's approach to "self-empowerment".

"Mom," Micah whimpers, her eyes still moist, "It's like I'm just not dateable. I mean, none of the guys want to go out with me... If I was allowed to wear makeup, then at least I could compete with the other girls." I shake my head, trying to find a way to respond. But Micah continues, wailing, "All I want is to be DATEABLE..."

So goes the scene I imagine in my head after reading the R U Dateable website. It's not a pretty picture.

What if Micah's biggest goal in life is to be "dateable"- to be desired and wanted by men? What if my competitive, ambitious, super self-conscious middle child decides the most important thing she can be is wanted by some man? How much more pathetic an aspiration could we find for existence?

A preface and a few disclaimers

In what follows- my grappling with "dateability"- the narrative will not attempt the impossible task of remaining gender-neutral. Because Mr. Lookaboo's worldview is so incredibly gendered, I will try to explain why it fails to make the world a more beguiling and beautiful place for our children rather than present compelling arguments against a gendered interpretation of human relations (arguments to which I fully subscribe). Note that gendered accounts are precisely what keeps the "war of the sexes" running. If we approach other humans as individuals, we are less likely to rely on gendered cliches to explain and understand the behavior of what turns out to be just another human being. 

Given the heteronormativity of every single word uttered by Mr. Lookaboo, I won't try to explain why such a narrow understanding of human sexuality is poisonous to individual flourishing (one reason why I reject heteronormative accounts). It's too big and breathtaking to bring in; I can't do it justice and still explain what bothers me so deeply about this emerging dateability paradigm.

Instead, I'm going to stick to the narrow, nasty picture painted by Mr. Lookaboo- a picture in which girls should "accept" being girls while guys should remember that they are on top, the world is theirs to "lead", destroy and pillage without regard to so-called feminine virtues like empathy, compassion, and honor for human life.

"Dude, that girl is sooooo dateable...." and other forms of empowerment

For the record, friends, it is not a compliment to say someone is "dateable". Not for those of us who prefer to be respected as individuals rather than prototypes. In fact, I'll go so far as to suggest that Justin Lookadoo might have done us all a favor by revealing "dateability" and the teenage dating world for the misogynist entry-level meat market that it is.

That said, I feel that Lookadoo's brand of uplift is humiliating for men, women, girls, boys, and human beings in general. The only thing that gets lifted is an oversexualized valuation of females that encourages duplicity, manipulation, and lack of personal integrity. Granted, guys get to pat themselves on the back for maintaining the double standard that requires girls to pay them homage for acting like douches.

Being a guy is good. Dateable guys know they aren’t as sensitive as girls and that’s okay. They know they are stronger, more dangerous, and more adventurous and that’s okay. Dateable guys are real men who aren’t afraid to be guys.

Obviously, given these sorts of assumptions, Mr. Lookaboo is relieved to have been born a "guy". I can't imagine hearing those words and thinking somehow that being born a girl is anything other than a twisted form of slavery or punishment. Unlike yours truly, Compassion International, a well-known Christian nonprofit, celebrates Mr. Lookadoo's approach to empowerment on their website:

Justin Lookadoo's witty, off-the-wall-style of writing, nails reality "slab dab in the middle," as translated in Justin's native El Paso lingo.

He leverages current and relevant cultural twists to show teens that biblical Christian values are actually cool rules to live by.

He says, "Everything I do wraps around two themes: identity and purpose. Who am I? Why am I here? These are the challenges that face young people today."

When it comes to young adults, Jason is a certified specialist in the field, having served as a juvenile probation officer, crime and drug prevention specialist for six years.

I'm not sure that Jason/Justin assisted juvenile offenders in understanding why rape or sexual assault are unacceptable violations of human dignity. Mr. Lookadoo's advice to young girls overemphasizes their sexual presentation to men and then holds them responsible for the effect. For example:

“Please, please don't tease us. To show us your hot little body ... and then tell us we can't touch it is being a tease. You can't look that sexy and then tell us to be on our best behavior.”

Is it so hard to go from this to the presumption that a girl who is raped was "asking for it"? How does Compassion International interpret this statement in light of its primary mission involving compassion for other human beings? Mr. Lookaboo is radically compassionate in that he reserves his compassion for girls in burkas. Wouldn't it be better if he just reminded guys that girls do not exist for the purpose of their sexual arousal or pleasure? Just because you see a girl that looks attractive does not mean you have a "right" to look at her or fantasize about her. Nothing that a girl puts on her body gives you any rights over her body. The only rights you have with respect to another human being are those explicity communicated by word of mouth.

Oddly, this sort of market-driven approach to the female body poises Mr. Lookadoo to be an excellent would-be critic of consumer culture, advertising, and modern capitalism- except, of course, that this is not the direction in which he plans to take us. Not at all. That's because Mr. Lookadoo wants us to buy his dating books and his "hip" persona as an alternative to so-called popular mainstream culture. 

“Ladies, I’m going to say this in the nicest way possible….you are the most horrible, awful, vindictive creatures this planet has ever seen.”

How would you feel if you happen to have a vulva and have to listen to this without being able to stand up and respond? Unfortunately, I feel more empowered by listening to a Chris Rock stand-up routine than I do by listening to Mr. Lookadoo. At least Chris Rock doesn't wear the Christian brand on his shoulder.

Come to think of it, Lookadoo leaves the same taste in my mouth as watching Bill Maher- a gross disgusted taste which makes me more conscious of my "fleshly goods" than my spirit, independence, or individuality. The female body is America's most inflated, liposuctioned, labioplasted commodity, with Lookadoo, Bill Maher, and Hugh Hefner acting as a few of its greatest salesmen.

Guys should be honest, but girls should master the fine arts of salesmanship and deception

Mr. Lookadoo's divergent advice for guys and gals expresses the differing power relations accorded to sex and gender in the present day. Guys, as the power-holding group, can afford to be themselves and to express their feelings (or lack thereof). Meanwhile, girls, as the powerless, must play to those in power and try to trick or manipulate them into tossing a few token crumbs of respect in their direction. It's a nasty charade- one we can only hope to finally bury.

Be honest with girls. Dateable guys don’t use the truth to their advantage. They know that girls read into things so they don’t use that for their good. They are honest and not manipulative.

Boys tell it like it is. But girls need to tell it like the boys want to hear it. If reading Lookaboo's rules for dateability makes a girl feel manipulative and twisted, that's because this is precisely what Lookaboo reccommends.

Part of being a Dateable girl means you really see people. They matter, and if you don’t look them in the eye then you will never see them and they will never know they matter to you. Look ‘em in the eye. They are valuable.

It's an old salesman's trick- connect with someone by meeting their gaze and holding it. It's the best way to disarm a person, to cuddle up close to their mind without physically touching their body. And, yes, looking into someone's eyes is exciting, suggestive, and erotic- it's the sexiest way to kiss and make love; it's the source of swoons for Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters. But for Mr. Lookaboo, who doesn't really believe in uncontrived, romantic love, looking 'em in the eye is key to a succesful sales pitch.

God made guys as leaders. Dateable girls get that and let him do guy things, get a door, open a ketchup bottle. They relax and let guys be guys. Which means they don’t ask him out!!!

The sales pitch matters because Lookaboo believes a woman's job is to manipulate a man into wanting to marry her. The dateable girl knows how to sell herself to a man. The more a girl can make a guy feel like the stud, the more likely he will bloom into the true stud that God intended him to be. So when a guy doesn't want to change the diapers, you can bet there is a woman to blame- a woman, maybe his wife, that doesn't "let him lead". 

Need him. Dateable girls know that guys need to be needed. A Dateable girl isn’t Miss Independent. She knows we are made for community. Needing each other is part of faith. She allows him to be needed at times, knowing he was called to serve just as much as she was.

But you can't blame an aspiring dater for being confused... not when the next suggestions from Mr. Lookaboo involve hiding your interest, feelings, enthusiasms, passions, and thoughts from the very person you're supposedly pretending to "need". The suggestions for fakery and dishonest self-presentation undergird every aspect of Mr. Lookaboo's rules for girls. Like the old Madonna-whore dichotomy, a girl is asked to play two different drums at the same time while admitting to not having played either. 

The sexiest thing on a girl is happiness. Girls try so hard to add beauty and sexuality to themselves with clothes and make-up, but the truth is it’s your spirit that makes you hot. Your outlook on life, your happiness factor. Dateable girls aren’t downers, they love life.

Pretend to be happy. Smile all the time. When you don't feel it, fake it.

Be mysterious. Dateable girls know how to shut up. They don’t monopolize the conversation. They don’t tell everyone everything about themselves. They save some for later. They listen more than they gab.

Pretend to be shy and "mysterious"- as if being yourself, a unique and fantastic human being, isn't mysterious enough. Nod when a dude speaks, and don't get in the way of his fantasies about you by allowing him to get to know the person over the prototype.

Dateable girls know that confidence is hot. And the cool part is that no one knows if you are confident but you. Confidence isn’t how you feel, it’s how you act. Act confident and people will think you are.

Pretend that you are the bee's knees- because you're not the bee's knees. You're actually just another girl trying desperately to "win" a guy's attention. You don't have to love yourself- that's not what you need to be working through during those teenage years. No, save the self-love for later. Right now, just focus on pretending to love yourself so you can get a guy to love you.

The best girl is one who fakes it

But then, just so you don't too comfortable, remember...

Dateable girls don’t lie to themselves. They don’t say stuff like, “His girlfriend just isn’t good to him, that’s why he’s seeing me on the side.” Or “She started it so I’m going to get even.” The Dateable girl let’s God run the world, and tells herself the truth–that all she can control is herself. She doesn’t imagine things to be more than they are.

(Note: All spelling mistakes belong to Mr. Lookaboo- I'm just doing as a dateable girl should do, namely copying and pasting the formidable wisdom of a male leader.) So dateable girls don't just sit and listen to a motivational speaker disparage them on the basis of their sexual organs. Instead, a dateable girl

So we find ourselves back in the Garden of Eden. Back to the paradise where a man blamed a woman's independence for his own course of action. Eve didn't let Adam lead. See what happens when a man follows a woman? Personally, I'm more inclined towards Jacques Ellul's reading of the Eden story, one in which God decides to let women bear children because they're the ones who can be trusted to think of a future bigger than themselves (rather than looking for someone else, to blame for the choices they've made). 

This "dateability" bull-poop prepares a woman to blame herself for her partner's future infidelity, should she be one of the odd 50% of marriages in which such an event were to occur. Up next from Mr. Lookadoo... the book R U Sexworthy, a how-to guide on ways to keep a wild, adventuresome, undomesticated man from cheating once he discovers that marriage is an institution intended to pay lip service to the dignity of two individuals (as opposed to their "adventuresome" inclinations). Okay, so I made up that last bit about the book. 

But here is what I'm not fudging. I'm not fudging the fact that Mr. Lookaboo and his crew should never be allowed to present their ideas in a school as a speech or lecture. The only context in which Mr. Lookaboo should speaking to teenagers is in a debate, where opposing paradigms are given equal time and students have a chance to come to their own conclusions. 

7 FAST REASONS WHY UNDATEABLE PEOPLE ROCK

1. Undateables will not allow another person to disparage them on the basis of their sexual organs without pointing out to said person that such insults are unacceptable. And when men like Mr. Conservative call their response an "attack", undateables point out that their response would me more accurately called a "counter-attack".
2. Undateables focus their energies on learning how to love themselves rather than constructing a false self they hope will be loved by others if they can manage to get the sales pitch just right.
3. Undateables revel in flexible constructions of gender that allow them to thrive and flourish without resorting to fakery.
4. Undateables don't have to worry about remember "rules" that have no bearing on personal ethics or integrity.
5. Undateables prefer communication to duplicituous manipulation.
6. Undateables don't blame victims for the crimes perpetuated against them.
7. Undateables are capable of compassion and empathy for persons who don't fit in the dating box or the conventional categories.

Now read what others have to say about Mr. Lookadoo's message. 

The Christian Science Monitor's Modern Parenthood blog responds
Jamie Clark-Soles responds
Make Me a Sammich responds
Matthew L. Skinner looks at the Biblical side of Lockado's and Lockadon'ts
Not Black and White Thoughts responds
Taylor B. Allen responds and shares her petition
Happy Nice Time People's satire of Lookadoo
Christopher Zara on Lookadoo's connections to gay conversion therapy

OUR KOINONIA EXPERIENCE: A sense of place.

Days long past at Koinonia.

The spiritual kinship between Clarence Jordan and Wendell Berry is hard to escape. Both put a tremendous amount of stock in the importance of community and the beauty (not just the duty) of sacrifice. There were many moments when Wendell's words came to mind as I watched Koinonians share their concerns about the year's pecan harvest and the challenges of shared burdens. 

One of the interns left her book on the outdoor table at Jubilee House....

I am reminded of the poem, "Healing", which Wendell published in a book of essays called What Are People For?. A poignant excerpt:

Good work finds the way between pride and despair.

It graces with health. It heals with grace.

It preserves the given so that it remains a gift.

By it, we lose loneliness:

we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;

we enter the little circle of each other's arms,

and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,

and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.

Micah before one of the pecan orchards.

This commitment to living for and with others- living alongside nature in a mutually sustaining relationship with humans and creatures- is how a sense of "place" is created and cultivated. As pilgrims to an established place, we pay homage to it through awareness and respect. It is not our "place"- not unless we agree to give up our current lives and accept this shared responsibility- but it is a place we deeply admire. A place that has changed the way we feel the blood rush through our veins. A place that brings to life (and brings into life) many of the ideas that have changed our hearts and minds over the years. 

OUR KOINONIA EXPERIENCE: The first day at the farm.

Milla chases a kitty towards the herb and vegetable gardens at Koinonia.

Having been raised in a home where the basement often served as temporary residence for an Eastern Orthodox monks, nuns, and artists, my heart holds a special fondness for monastic communities and their devoted denizens. As an intentional community, the days at Koinonia follow a deliberate pattern which soon feels like a flow- a rhythm subject to changes in volume and tone yet unfluctuating.  

There is a daily discipline. For the residents and interns, communal life begins at 7:45 a.m. with silent meditation and prayer at the chapel, followed by morning devotions at 8:15. On weekdays, after chapel, everyone stands in a circle on the dew-covered grass and discusses daily work assignments and service. 

“Faith is not belief in spite of evidence but a life in scorn of the consequences.” 
                Clarence Jordan, The Substance of Faith: And Other Cotton Patch Sermons

We woke up the first morning to a room bathed in light and the unmistakable sound of roosters crowing nearby. Still tired from the drive, I lingered in bed with the kids, listening to the roosters and trying to decide if we could get dressed quickly enough to make it to chapel.

My long-haired Max, still flirting with sleep, observed, "Hey, maybe the roosters are like church bells here..." Clearly, we were being called to chapel by the combination of ethereal morning sunlight and rooster bells. Groggy and hungry, I followed the kids out the door just a few minutes too late. Before the guilt set in, the little people started gallivanting through the bright green grass, sniffing flowers (and weeds), exclaiming over spectacular "fire ant castles", and befriending a couple of very friendly kittens.

Clearly, we were being called... to life.  So we set out to explore the farm. The seasonal interns that shared suites and rooms with us in the Jubilee House were returning from chapel. Clad in rubber books and carrying coffee cups, they stopped to greet us warmly before setting off on their assigments for the day. Lacking an assignment, we set off down a path following the kittens.

Max keeps an eye on the ladies who lay the eggs.

Lo and behold, the henhouse awaited us. Max tried to classify the feathered friends while the girls avoided a rather startled turkey that lumbered around the corner of an old wooden shed. 

And then we discovered "three little piggies", to borrow Milla's phrasing.

Soon all three kids found themselves enamored of pigs.

Milla carried our cardboard butterfly book from path to path.

The Koinonia bell rings three times a day for a moment of silent meditation and prayer. Whereever you may be working or studying, whether in the fields or in the bakery, the bell rings at 10:30 am, 3:30 pm, and 8:30 pm. As the days slipped past, I found myself listening for the sound of the bell to divide the morning and afternoon, to make me aware, again, of the rhythm behind everyone's actions and intentions.

At the 10:30 ringing, folks congregate in the coffee house to brew a couple of pots and share their thoughts with one another. Coffee creamer waits in the pitcher of fresh milk coaxed from resident cows at the first crack of dawn by Brendan; something about the coffee (probably the creamer) tasted sublime. We introduced ourselves to a couple of Koninians, though names and faces still tended to run together at this point.

A charming intern named Susie shared her own experiences as a home-schooled child. As we chatted, I found myself thinking (probably contrary to her own impressions) that her independent spirit and openness were exactly the sorts of qualities I treasure in Max, Micah, and Milla- the qualities I hope to honor and cultivate, the qualities that may one day lead them to choose the sort of journey that brings them back, as interns, to Koinonia. 

My restless desire to help somehow rubbed against the three little people who needed my guidance and care. In my imaginary world, of course, I could volunteer while somehow juggling the needs of three kids (one still potty training). But reality intervened to put a kink in my plans. Trying to avoid the sense of annoyance- "I came here to help and then but for the small folks"- I reminded myself that I was here to serve and to learn; and that the two did not have to take the form I imagined.

I closed my eyes, counted to ten backwards, and vowed to stay open to what the surroundings, and the spirit that filled them, wanted me to learn. Even if it was something as unexciting as the realization that my own impatience and eagerness often stands in the way of my humility towards the daily tasks and demands of life. 

Milla stares down a goose outside the dining hall.

We camped out at Jubilee House sharing Clarence Jordan stories and writing (or coloring) poems and hymns until the lunch bell rang. Then we wandered over to the dining hall for what would be our first communal meal- an experience that truly merits a post of its own, one which I look forward to sharing later this week. The short version is that the shared meal time transformed my understanding of communion and fellowship. The meal took two rituals which had managed to stay separate and brought them together with all the force and power of an intergalactic collision. 

I think we ate a few of these delicious flowers at lunch in the salad.

Our explorations took us to the town of Americus and then back to the farm, where we read, wandered, chatted, and played before meeting everyone again at dinner. I kept finding funny stories- tales of Clarence- in books and magazines, stories I read to the little people over laughs and giggles. Stories like this one.  

Once when he was being given a tour of a new church building, the pastor pointed to the cross on the steeple. The pastor said something like, "That cross alone cost $10,000."

Clarence said, "You got cheated. Times were when Christians could get them for free."

"Clarence was a funny farmer," Micah declared. 

The sun set without a sound. As Micah and Milla changed into their pajamas ande debated whether or not to brush their teeth, I read the free copy of Koinonia Farm Chronicle laying on the table in our room. Just reading it made the world feel like a better place- the kind of place in which it made sense that I never once locked a car door or a room door during our stay. Once everyone finished their pre-bed preparations, we changed our minds about the bed and set out on one of our "starlight walk", a tradition quickly started under the vast, starlit Koinonia skies. 

"Mom, we're really just tiny things," said Max, staring upwards from the center of the meadow where we settled and snuggled in the tall grass. 

"No Max!", replied Micah, huffy as always. "Milla is tiny but I am big- my feet are big too!"

The lull left a space for me to speak, maybe to soothe the misunderstanding by reasserting the hierarchies of big, small, and in-between. Older, younger, wise- all the known quantities- felt too heavy to handle in that open field. Something about the beautiful night skies always steals the words from my lips.

Making sense of language pales next to the mysteries of existence- the wonder of all that remains ineffable. So we talked about the word "ineffable" instead. And then we sat together, all four on the verge of a shiver, and paid a silent tribute to the ongoing ineffability of things.

Previously, I blogged a little bit about the history of Koinonia. Stay tuned for the next post about our Koinonia experience...

OUR KOINONIA EXPERIENCE: The arrival and introduction.

What we saw when woke up at Koinonia Farms and the dew soaked our shoes.

A few weeks ago, we took a little trip that may have changed our lives. The kids and I drove down to Americus, Georgia in search of Koinonia Farm, an intentional Christian community started by Clarence Jordan way back in the 1940's. We didn't know what to expect of the experience- only that it had been on my list of hopes for a long time and calendars finally cleared to make it possible.

Since the king had to keep up appearances of having a "real job" during the week, he remained in Tuscaloosa then drove down on Friday and joined us for the weekend. This left me and the munchkin-heads driving alone at night along the winding backroads of Georgia looking for a tiny slice of history that managed to live its way into the present.

Koinonia first came to my attention a few years ago while planning and preparing the Local History Workshop for homeschoolers. Trying to find local notables for the kids to "reenact" at the final gathering, I discovered that Millard and Linda Fuller, founders of Habitat for Humanity, once lived in Tuscaloosa before they sold their fancy lives and moved to Koinonia in search of meaning over money.

Millard Fuller's relationship with a former Baptist preacher by the name of Clarence Jordan played a significant role in the founding of Habitat. I caught a whiff of tantalizing details. The skeleton of story never left my mind, though the flesh of it needed filling. I vowed to learn more about this Baptist pacifist preacher who managed to anger ever respectable, success-craving social group in the town of Americus. 

Finally, I learned.... through immersion. For almost a week, we wandered around Koinonia, chatting with members, interns, and volunteers, as well as reading every book I could find on the topic. When we weren't gobbling down cinnamon pecans, we were asking questions and devouring answers. I wanted to understand why Clarence founded a separate community rather than work within the existing nearby town of Americus. I needed to see what sharing meant apart from cliches and abstractions. The kids, of course, spent the week roamschooling the history of civil rights movement and life on a permaculture-based farm. 

In the early 1940's, Clarence and his wife Florence Jordan set about to change their world alongside Martin England and his wife, two missionaries with a similar frame of reference.  The Jordans and the Englands established Koinonia Farm as a communal, interracial farming community. Their model came from the verses of Acts 2:43-47 and Acts 4:32-36. The two couples envisioned a community whose members would eat and work together, sharing their property, their labor and their lives. The act of breaking bread together- communion- took on a special significance as they sought to develop a racially-integrated community based on love and fellowship. Soon, Sumter County residents began to criticize Koinonia residents for having been conscientious objectors during World War II. 

From where we stand, it's hard to grasp how radical Koinonia seemed to its fellow Georgians. At its founding, the civil rights movement hadn't yet gained a threshold. For the first decade after 1942, Koinonia grew slowly. The hard work of racial reconciliation and building trust with local black neighbors took a fair share of time. After all, a black man or woman invited to share a meal with a white man or woman back in those days had every reason to suspect a ruse. Segregation was enforced through social conventions and norms- the force of the law wasn't needed to keep whites from forming intimate, true relationships with blacks. But the Jordans and the Englands keep sowing their tiny seeds, nurturing buds where they blossomed and tending to the growing network of human beings in what was becoming a special part of "the beloved community".

Soon, select Sumter County residents began to criticize Koinonia residents for having been conscientious objectors during World War II. In 1950, the Rehobeth Baptist Church, the place of worship for most members of Koinonia, voted to remove the names of six Koinonians from its membership roll because church members believed that the Koinonians were trying to integrate the church. The "integration" in question occurred when the Jordans brought a visiting Indian Hindu friend along to observe worship services. Perhaps having had so little exposure to members of other races led the church elders to confuse an Indian with a black American. 

Meanwhile, in nearby Americus, the Ku Klux Klan was enjoying a cultural renaissance among the middle classes. For professionals and hoighty-toighty types, the formation of the national White Citizens' Council in 1954 proved a boon. With the WCC, local segregationists and racists found a vehicle to act as a political and economic lobby for their darkest sentiments while maintaining their positions of leadership as Rotarians and citizens. Unlike the KKK, the WCC rejected violent tactics to maintain segregation. In the place of cross-burnings, Council members used economic boycotts and social stigmatization to maintain white privilege in towns across the South. 

By 1956, Koinonia had 65 members, 15 of which were black. For the first decade, Koinonians managed live without much interest from the town of Americus. By the 1950's, however, the rising power of the WCC and the beginning of the civil rights movement drew unwanted attention. A persistent campaign of drive-by shootings, bombings and other forms of terrorism and violence began. The work of farming was complicated by the daily fear of reprisal. Koinonia members worried about attacks on their children. 

In 1956, Clarence's unsuccessful endorsement of the applications of two African Americans to Georgia State University in Atlanta precipitated two years of vandalism, legal investigations, and violence, as well as a decade of economic boycott against Koinonia Farm. The successful farming enterprise halted. 

Always on the look-out for a way in which to "serve" their fellow man, the Klan bombed Koinonia's little roadside nut stand. Undeterred, the group rebuilt the stand only to have it blown up again. Having gotten the message, Koinonia switched to selling nuts by mail order, with the slogan: "Help us ship the nuts out of Georgia!" Thus Koinonians adapted by developing a mail-order pecan business, which depended on purchases from people across the United States who had learned of Koinonia's plight from the national news media.

According to Cotton Patch for the Kingdom by Anne Louse Coble, a band of men from the popular Ku Klux Klan showed up one night with some news for the Jordans and the Englands. "We understand you been taking your meals with the nigger," said their spokesman, "and we're here to tell you we don't allow the sun to set on anybody who eats with niggers."

Clarence couldn't resist. With a smile, he turned to the KKK spokesman and replied:

"I'm a Baptist preacher and I just graduated from the Southern Baptist Seminary. I've heard about people who had power over the sun, but I never hoped to meet one."

The Klansmen, one of whom had a Baptist preacher for a father, understood that Koinonia would be a thorn in the side of their attempts to keep Americus (and America) "racially pure" through segregation. Maybe the only thing Clarence could have done to further infuriate them would have been to start whistling "Jesus Loves the Little Children", a Baptist Sunday School staple. 

It was these little things, like the lyrics of "Jesus Loves the Little Children", alongside obvious big things, like Clarence's understanding of the New Testament after earning his doctorate in Greek, that made it impossible for him to play by the rules of his culture. And it was his unabiding commitment to love and fellowship that drew pilgrims and wanderers from all around the world to this small farm somewhere in Georgia. I found myself comforted at being just another pilgrim in a long line of names and faces drawn by the dream Clarence left behind.

Jubilee House, where we spent our days and nights in a cozy suite complete with kitchen and all the settings. 

We arrived around 8 or 9 p.m. with restless little people and their excited, nervous mother. A young intern greeted me- there was a group of five or six reading aloud and chatting on the front porch of the Jubilee House when we arrived- and showed me to our apartment. A big part of me wanted to go jump into a chair and chat with the interns, learn their stories, but the other part of me knew the singing and dancing that follows me wherever I go might be disruptive. It was a peaceful scene- and we four were sounding anything but peaceful.

Koinonia was the birthplace of so many amazing social projects and nonprofits, including Habitat for Humanity, Jubilee Partners, Prison Jail Project, and Fuller Center for Housing, among others. I found myself wondering if those conversations had taken place around the table at Jubilee House. Walking through history demands the ability to inhabit the mystery of "place"- to see how even a wobbly nightstand offers signficance and inspiration. We whispered and hugged, happy to begin another adventure, this one in place imbued with unseen wonders and whys.

 

 Max explores the playground castle across from Jubilee House.

So we settled into our apartment, slipped on some pajamas, and then ventured out the back door to sit in a field and stare at the amazing moon and her sister stars covering every square inch of the sky. Milla marveled over "all those stars" while Max and Micah invented new constellations from the myriad of twinkles. 

The sign above the screened-in porch.

The easiest way to keep up with the latest at Koinonia is through the Facebook page. If you are in the Americus area this weekend, Koinonia is co-hosting an event with Tree of Life, an interfaith group that seeks to provide conferences and educational opportunities to help make this a more just and peaceful world in which to live. Four Koinonians traveled into the Holy Lands with Tree of Life- and they will share what they learned in their peacemaking efforts. Contact information is available at the FB link.

Stay tuned for the next installment of our Koinonia experience....

"To Lou Andreas-Salome" by Rainer Maria Rilke.

In 1897, while roaming the busy streets of Munich, Rainer Maria Rilke met and fell in love with the widely traveled, intellectual woman of letters Lou Andreas-Salomé. His relationship with this married woman, with whom he undertook two extensive trips to Russia, lasted until 1900. But even after their separation, Lou continued to be Rilke's most important confidante until the end of his life. 

Lou touched almost every aspect of Rainer's life. He even changed his first name from "René" to the more masculine Rainer at Lou's urging. After they ended their sexual affair for the second time, Lou wrote one of my favorite good-byes of all time to him. It is a good-bye that does not make demands on the future yet assures a reverence for what came to pass between them. It is a good-bye in which the "good" is honored and treasured. Her words:

"I am faithful to memories forever; to people I shall never be faithful".
Lou Andreas-Salome to Rainer Maria Rilke 

Rainer and Lou with friends

During the course of his brief life, Rilke wrote a number of poems directly or indirectly inspired by his love of Lou. Though she was more than a decade older than Rilke, Lou freed his pen and loosened his pantaloons in the magnificent manner of the muse. Here is one of the fruits of their union.

To Lou Andreas-Salome

I held myself too open, I forgot
that outside not just things exist and animals
fully at ease in themselves, whose eyes
reach from their lives' roundedness no differently
than portraits do from frames; forgot that I
with all I did incessantly crammed
looks into myself; looks, opinion, curiosity.
Who knows: perhaps eyes form in space
and look on everywhere. Ah, only plunged toward you
does my face cease being on display, grows
into you and twines on darkly, endlessly,
into your sheltered heart.

As one puts a handkerchief before pent-in-breath-
no: as one presses it against a wound
out of which the whole of life, in a single gush,
wants to stream, I held you to me: I saw you 
turn red from me. How could anyone express
what took place between us? We made up for everything
there was never time for. I matured strangely
in every impulse of unperformed youth,
and you, love, had wildest childhood over my heart.

Memory won't suffice here: from those moments
there must be layers of pure existence
on my being's floor, a precipitate
from that immensely overfilled solution.

For I don't think back; all that I am
stirs me because of you. I don't invent you
at sadly cooled-off places from which
you've gone away; even your not being there
is warm with you and more real and more
than a privation. Longing leads out too often
into vagueness. Why should I cast myself, when,
for all I know, your influence falls on me,
gently, like moonlight on a window seat.

To learn more about Rainer and Lou, pick up a copy of Rilke and Andreas-Salome: A Love Story in Letters. Or explore a few of the following free online resources...

Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910 (Full text)
Lou Salome and Rilke (Philo Agora) 
She wrote to Rilke, "You alone are real to me..." (Neale Lundgren) 
Book review of Lou's illustrated memoirs (New York Times) 
Illustrated timeline of Rilke's life (Picture Poems) 
The Death of Lou Andreas-Salome (On This Deity) 
Rainer Maria Rilke (Sonnets To Orpheus) 

Honoring Jon Daniels' life and love.

Pilgrims in Hayneville hold an icon of Jonathan Daniels on this year's pilgrimage.

If you do a quick online search for the name "Jon Daniels", you'll find multiple links to the manager of a major sports team. What you probably won't find, however, is a link to the "Jon Daniels" that made such a difference in the world as we have come to know it.

Jonathan Myrick Daniels (March 20, 1939 – August 20, 1965) was an Episcopal seminarian, killed for his work in the American civil rights movement. His death helped galvanize support for the civil rights movement within the Episcopal church. He is regarded as a martyr in the Episcopal church. The wikipedia entry offers more facts and details. Now I'll offer my own shrivelled synposis.

While Jon was studying at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the spring of 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. put out a call for students and clergy to come to Alabama and participate in a march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery. The students debated how to respond to a call from the dark- a darkness made more palpable by its social and intellectual distance. Tim Abbott shares his father's own encounter with King's call, as well as with Jon Daniels:

Dad describes his own growing activism and the late night conversations with his fellow seminarians in which "we were honing our positions and our hearts on what had to be done."  He remembers his classmate Jonathan Daniels as a complex man, and totally non-violent. "I was in a very different place than he was, in terms of active activism and spirituality" he told me.  "In his liturgical way he could sing the Magnificat and feel as if that was his calling, a true Epiphany, and I wasn't there yet.  I was studying religion rather than living it the way he was.  I was much closer to the activism, on the verge, but there were too many easy rationalizations for not going down to Selma.  They weren't about self-protecting - I was not as concerned about personal harm, though perhaps I should have been - but felt I had obligations at school...When he went to Selma with the 1st wave, a couple of seminarians went with him..."

Thus Jon answered the call. And then he missed his bus back to Cambridge. Feeling pulled by the social breakdown he witnesses in Alabama, Jon stayed behind in Selma the rest of that semester to help the civil rights movement.  He returned to Cambridge for his final exams, and then went back to Alabama in July. Because something unspeakable kept pulling this highly-disciplined, non-flamboyant, dedicated young seminarian back...

There was a moment, of course, when Jon’s commitment to the beloved community became clear. This moment came prior to his time in Selma at a time when he was working in Wilcox County, specifically in the town of Camden, where sharecropping remained the primary industry for blacks. In Camden, Jon first experienced tear gas and came to see the ribald fear of blacks to become a casualty of the march for their own freedom.

He found himself inhabiting his own "existential moment". To have an existential moment is to become aware of the fact that our lives have signficance and that we exist within them- that we are responsible for them and to a spiritual sense of self characterized by a concern for integrity. An older man who lives on my street likes to call those moments "epiphanies"; I'm inclined to follow his judgement. 

The impact of this epiphany on Jon's faith was life-giving. He wrote:

My hostility really lasted until last week. I think it was when I got teargassed leading a march in Camden that I began to change. I saw that the men who came at me were themselves not free: it was not that cruelty was so sweet to them (though I’m afraid sometimes it is) but that they didn’t know what else to do. Even though they were white and hateful and my enemy, they were human beings, too. I found myself feeling a kind of grim affection for them, at least a love that was real and ‘existential’ rather than abstract….. Last week in Camden I began to discover a new freedom in the Cross: freedom to love the enemy. And in that freedom, the freedom (without hypocrisy) to will and to try to set him free.

On August 14th, Daniels was arrested for protesting against a "whites only" store, and he was sent to a county jail in Haynesville, Alabama, along with several others.  After their release on August 20th, Daniels, along with a Catholic priest and two young African-Americans, went to a local store to get a soft drink.  They were met at the door by the store's owner, Tom Coleman, who was carrying a shotgun.  When Coleman aimed the gun at 17 year old Ruby Sales, Daniels pushed her away, and he caught the full impact of the blast in his chest, killing him instantly.

The story of his murder was reported nationally in the immediate aftermath of his death, and once again after his killer was acquitted by an all-white Alabama jury.

Jon completed his college education at Virginia Military Institute, where he was a valedictorian, before deciding to attend seminary. This is his VMI class photograph.

As a seminarian, Jon struggled to continue his studies while fulfilling his spiritual calling to serve the torn communities of our state. Soon, his experiences in Alabama began to inform and supplement his theological education; the abstractions of theory rubbed shoulders with the reality of love in an angry, selfish world. It became hard for Jon to separate the texts from the people he encountered along the way. For his theology Professor William J. Wolf, Jon submitted a paper he’d prepared during the summer entitled “Theological Reflections on My Experience in Selma”. In it, he described his experiences as the source of a "living theology", a faith lived anew in each day of one's life, a love lived with immanence and resolve:

All of this is the raw material for living theology.  And yet in as deep a sense, from my point of view, it is the product of living theology.  The doctrines of the creeds, the enacted faith of the sacraments, were the essential preconditions of the experience itself.  The faith with which I went to Selma has not changed: it has grown.  Darkening coals have kindled. Faith has taken wing and flown with a song in its wings. 'My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my Spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior...'

I lost fear in the Black Belt when I began to know in my bones and sinews that I had truly been baptized into the Lord's Death and Resurrection, that in the only sense that really matters I am already dead, and my life is hid with Christ in God…

The point is simply, of course, that one’s motives are usually mixed- and one had better know it. It occurred to me that though I was reasonably certain that I was in Selma because the Holy Spirit had sent me there, there nevertheless remained a fundamental distinction between my will and His.

This paper was read at Jon's funeral as a eulogy. I read it now as a testament to the message of love he left behind. How many of us know the saints that live just down the street? How many times have we encountered a love so certain that we find our fears and anxieties dissipate as the urge to share this love becomes a central part of our lives.

The signs of the times- the signs Jon prayed would disappear, and take with them, the paralyzing fear felt by many blacks in Alabama.

Jon Daniels is a model for all of us who lose sight of the way in which love demands that we respond with unconditional love in the immediate, absolute present. Carpe diem is not a slogan that urges us to throw back as many beers as possible during a football game- it's a slogan that reminds us no love and no faithful action can be postponed to a "better time" or a "better place". The only time we can be sure of is this moment. The only acceptable time to do what is right- to honor the image of God in every life- is the present. Living in the moment means loving in the moment. Nothing is a greater, more worthy challenge.

The life and ministry of Jon Daniels is remembered on August 14th every year by the Episcopal Church. In this context, the role of the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity (ESCRU) played a pivotal role in eventually integrating southern public institutions. Members of ESCRU felt that Daniel’s alleged murderer, Tom Coleman, was acquitted wrongfully and that white juries would continue to fail to convict those that should be found guilty of race and hate crimes. In response to the acquittal, ESCRU launched Operation Southern Justice, a campaign and lawsuit undertaken in conjunction with the National Council of Churches and other groups to integrate southern juries.

The Episcopal Diocese of Alabama supports an annual pilgrimage to Hayneville to honor Jon Daniels' sacrifice. 2013 marked the 15th annual Jonathan Daniels Pilgrimage. Though we missed it this year, our calendars will keep this date open for August of next year. I was especially inspired by a 2010 pilgrim's post about how the experience impacted her life and spirit....

For more on the life and death of Jon Daniels:

Outside Agitator, the wonderful biography written by Charles Eagles (and published by the University of Alabama Press) that led me to Jon Daniels' life
"But My Heart Is Black," an article by Jon published Oct. 29, 1965
"A Burning Bush", an article by Jon written in April 1965
Jonathan Daniels lectionary 
Jon Daniels (Encyclopedia of Alabama)
Daniels' 1961 Valedictory Address (Virginia Military Institute)  
Daniels' Yearbook page (Virginia Military Institute) 
Memorial plaque for Daniels in Hayneville, Alabama 
White House tape transcripts of Pres. Johnson's response to Daniels' murder 
Liturgical lesson plan for "A Love That Forgives" 
Bishop Fisher's blog post about Jon Daniels 
"The Journey of Jonathan Daniels" (Sentinel Source) 
"Memory and Denial Are Kissing Cousins" (Greensleeves) 

Love ain't easy.

"If the wings of the butterfly are to keep their sheen, you mustn't touch them. We mustn't abuse something which is to bring light into both our lives. Everything else in my life only weighs me down and shuts out the light. This thing with you seems like a window that is opening up. I want it to remain open...”

According to Francoise Gilot, as recorded in her memoir, Life With Picasso, these were Pablo's words as their relationship began. Granted, Pablo was a self-serving monomaniac who didn't see much in people apart from their own contribution to his art. But Francoise, to her credit, understood this from the beginning and, to her discredit, resigned herself to it early in their love.

On the way home from Canterbury a few weeks ago, the King and I argued over the meaning of the word “ego”- or maybe even its value. He denies its existence, perhaps worrying about the dualistic implications. He seemed so certain that it led me to hush and stop trying to explain why the word is a useful tool in helping us to understand our behavior and motivations in the world.

In English, the word “ego” is usually taken to mean “I” or “self”. It was never used prior to the emergence of the modern, self-conscious self- the one that lives in continuous awareness of how it is perceived by others. When I use the word “ego”, I refer to the rational, self-interested self- the part of us which responds to the world and asserts its identity in the world. Honestly, the ego leads us to the altar of marriage or partnership with only poetic asides to the need for sacrifice and empathy. 

When I got married, I assumed somehow, like Picasso, that the ego could remain untouched (perhaps even flattered) by the attention we call "romantic love". In a sense, the King could be a complement to my existing self, an appendage, if you will, to help me reach all the places and spaces and sentiments I couldn't reach on my own. Imagine my surprise to discover that marriage demanded more from me; that marriage required a metamorphosis- an opening up of my spirit and self to absorb the feelings of a separate human being.... 

"I don't do demands," I insisted, hoping to preserve this separate self I'd cultivated over the years.

One way we keep from loving is by insisting on seeing things from the limited perspective of our own egos. "If you want me to do something, you have to request it nicely..." In other words, I won't even consider anything that doesn't sound fun or fine or satisfying to me. And I'll use the way you express it as an excuse for not listening. Don't ask me how my feminism became an excuse for refusing to listen or love him because, honestly, anything makes room for an excuse when we're determined to find one. Don't ask me how infidelity becomes a way of life; don't bother to ask because I'm going to tell you.

The word “fidelity” is a noun that means “faithfulness to a person, cause, or belief, demonstrated by continuing loyalty and support”. Its original meaning regarded duty in a broader sense than the related concept of fealty. Both derive from the Latin word fidēlis, meaning "faithful or loyal". Being faithful to that sense of self that I acknowledge as my "ego" often required me to be unfaithful to the beautiful and forlorn creature known as our marriage. I didn't have an affair with another person; I simply continued my decade-long affair with myself. Since there wasn't another man or woman involved, it didn't fit in the usual boxes of infidelity, and I reassured myself that anything less smacked of co-dependence.

Co-dependence, of course, is just about the most ingracious insult one can hurl at a woman who always insisted on her own independence from the gaze of men, from the vagaries of media-driven culture, from the lame demands of first-wave feminism's attempt to mold us into sexier versions of the masculine stereotype.

"And yet I love him," I thought to myself, as I sat at the desk, planning the next day's events, trying to ignore the way his hurt morphed so quickly to anger. Truthfully, I love him more than I can bear. And so I didn't bear it. I found ways to distract myself from it- hobbies and social engagements meant to dignify the distance I maintained between my self and him. 

“Loving someone is giving them the power to break your heart, but trusting them not to,” says a famous Broadway actress and film star. Oh, that she knew how to add a sequel to this statement. 

"Above all, don't lie to yourself,” insists Dostoevsky, his words in the pages of The Brothers Karamazov. I listen for more, and he continues:

“The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love."

Is there no reprieve?

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image,” writes Thomas Merton. He continues, “If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”

I want to grab Merton by the robe and tell him, "But he's not the man I thought I married!", knowing Merton would tell me that loving the man I thought I married would be far less interesting than loving the man I actually married. It's not his failure to be a knight that bothers me; it's my failure to love that hurts me so much. I imagined myself to be such a good lover of all things great and small. But my penchant for post-modernism refuses to apply itself to loving a post-modern man. I want to think outside the box while keeping him snug within it.

"And yet I love him more than seems possible.... or reasonable.." I tell myself as I consider whether to bother brushing my teeth this morning.

So why do I insist on loving a version of him that I've created for my own consumption? Why don't I have the balls to love him for who he is? What keeps me from giving him the freedom of being loved as himself? The mirror tells me my answer looks like the rebellious, anti-toothbrushing woman staring back at me, eyebrows raised, not innocent so much as looking for the counter-attack, looking for the reason to insist on her own perogatives.

"But I love him..." I whisper once more. The right to say these words requires me to give more of myself to "Us" and less of myself to the old dullard known as "Me". Loving him doesn't mean I need to keep the house cleaner or making an effort to look "attractive" or learn some recipes and start cooking dinner or find pairs for all those mismatched socks heaped in our bathroom. Loving him means giving him more of me.

It's not easy to love in the era of endless self-helpery. It's not easy to love under the auspices of competitive capitalism, where the means (ceaseless mate selection and competition) justifies the ends (breast implants and pole-dancing, agreeing to compete with the pornography as if we could do so and still remain whole). 

"It's a rollercoaster, this life," I say to no one at all. I fear the moments when the roller-coaster plunges and we can't see for screaming. I relish the moments when it slows long enough for us to look at one another and feel the ground beneath our feet. I know he is the only one I can ride alongside because he's the one that won't tell me to get back in my seat and put on my seatbelt when I crawl into his lap, close my eyes, and imagine that our bodies are one and the same- that his fearlessness is mine, something we share, as sacred and certain as sunrise.

“Do not lose hope — what you seek will be found. Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped to help you in their turn. Trust dreams. Trust your heart, and trust your story.” Neil Gaiman grins and hands me the pen. I pick it up and feel sure of its solidity in my hand. I love him. I trust our story. Every day, I learn a little more how to let go and live the ride.

Eating at restaurants with little ones is always an adventure.

The adventure inadvertently includes the rest of the restaurant-goers, as it were. Some are sympathetic, smiling, and happy to be alive; others scowl, revealing that persistent pre-snarl and I left imagining the lecture they'll deliver on "well-behaved children" and public spaces. 

Milla tangles with me at the Mellow Mushroom.

Perhaps the conversation is familiar to you- or on your list of interactions to avoid. Let's imagine it goes something like this:

DISGRUNTLED EATER: (Rolling his eyes in your direction) Ma'am, your child (he spits the word out with distaste) is singing too loud...

WORRIED MOM: Oh, sir, I'm sorry. (turning to Milla) Milla, you have to sing in a whisper- we are at a restaurant.

MILLA: Okay Mommy. But we outside- you tell me I can sing outside.

WORRIED MOM: (Casts glance at disgruntled eater, who is following the conversation carefully) Yes, but not here Milla. This is a pizza patio where people come to eat.

DISGRUNTLED EATER: It is, after all, a PUBLIC place so bratty kids can't do whatever they want.

WORRIED MOM: (Getting annoyed with his tone) That's right- it is public place where all kinds of people come to eat, drink, talk, and hang out. There is no sign that says, "Autistic children are banned."

DISGRUNTLED EATER: Is she (pointing to Milla) autistic? Because that would explain her behavior.

WORRIED MOM: No, sir, she is not on the autism spectrum. She is 2 years old, which also explains her behavior. There is no sign which bans two-year-olds. Would you like for us to move to another table further away from you?

DISGRUNTLED EATER: Yes, I would. But it just so happens that I am sitting in the middle so any table will be the same distance from me.

WORRIED MOM: Well, sir, maybe the patio isn't the right place for you. Maybe you should go inside. There, you won't be bothered by the traffic honks, the sounds of rap blaring from car speakers, or the usual pedestrian noises. You may, however, find yourself inconvenienced by the loud television sportcasts and newscasts.

DISGRUNTED MAN: I am a paying customer and I did not pay to hear that baby (pronounced with distaste) sing some baby song while I eat.

WORRIED MOM: I see. You're not the kind of man who appreciates a serenade. If I had known, I would have brought a set of ear plugs for you so you can drown out the sound of life around you as you eat your pizza. Do you have a favorite song that Milla could sing for you?

DISGRUNTLED MAN: That's it- I'm moving inside. You people are crazy.

 

Milla dangles on the iron railing.

Well, that conversation did not happen on this day- the day mom and I went to talk about writing and my most recent handwritten adventures into Hannah Arendt's head.

I am grateful to have a mom who respects what I value in life- a mom who has learned that the unruliness of my hair and the tears in my jeans are a topic I prefer to avoid in conversation, a mom who enterains my interest in ideas and enjoys chasing them to different conclusions.

“What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsibile, who know the value of the world and not its economic potential. It means art, it means time, it means all the invisibles never counted by the GDP and the census figures. It means knowing that life has an inside as well as an outside. And I think it means love."
                                Jeanette Winterson, novelist, poet, and author 

Idea for a horror movie: The Ezzos come over for dinner with my family.

Who knows what I'm saying in this photo, but my stellar eye infection really brings out the chatty Cathy in me. Clearly, not an Ezzo moment.

Reading Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards' Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future illuminates the ways in which the struggles of feminism have gained complexity for the Third Wave. Since its publication in 2000, the book itself is already somewhat dated. For example, it glosses over the rising numbers of educated feminists who are choosing to educate their children at home with the premise that the revolution starts now. While providing ample information on the continuing battle for a choice over whether to continue pregnancy, the book skims over the tremendous battles fought by women who seek to reclaim their uterus and birthing process from the medical establishment by giving birth at home.

I can't read the words of sisters without remembering that it's my responsibility to say what I see and not to expect others to say it for me. Being a woman who has decided to also be a mother changed my mind and reaffirmed my belief in the continuing need for feminism in our society.

What I discovered did not please me. I am very good at biting off the head of a man who condescends to women and I am unparalleled in my ability to provide running monologues on the extent to which we perpetuate the patriarchy by honoring the concept of "success". Yet I am somewhat lacking when it comes to integrating my parenting choices (which tend to follow the child) with my Riot Grrrlish self. I'm going to take a little detour to explain what I mean by this.

Fact: It's important to parent and raise your children in a way that works best for you. However, "a way that works best for you" should not be taken to mean that the child becomes a product which you compare to other highly-valued objects. When we talk about children, we don't talk about possessions or things- we talk about little people whom we hope will NEVER be treated like possessions or things in our super-thingified culture.

After the King and I first got married, we attended a small-group for young parents which focused on parenting strategies. The textbook for the group was one written by the Ezzos which outlined their program for "Biblical parenting". As the sessions progressed, my discomfort with some of the phrasing from the Ezzos just wouldn't go away.

The "strategies" seemed mean and hurtful- as if to punish little babies for being needy, vulnerable little beings who cannot thrive or survive on their own. Letting them "cry it out" required me to deaden my most natural maternal instinct to comfort and soothe- and deadening that instinct leaves you less sensitive to a child's needs and concerns. I cannot believe that women were created with this universal instinct by accident. It seems to me to be an important part of the way in which God wants us to relate to our children. In other words, that constant nurturing impulse is a given- a starting premise for any parenting methods rooted in respect for human beings or their Creator.

Your Shenanigans Will Not Be Tolerated wittily sums up more Ezzo in the most snarky and simple fashion:

In a nutshell - and I will keep things to a nutshell, there is plenty of information readily available on him - Mr. Ezzo was complimented on how well behaved his kids were in church.  This led him to create the Babywise publishing empire.  Babywise, as a method to raise your baby is very similar to that of the Baby Whisperer.  The main difference, however, is that instead of getting to know your baby's signals & cues and respond to it's individual needs, you actively avoid learning its signals and cues and make it respond to your own personal needs.  This is generally done through starvation and abandonment.

The Ezzos believe the primary threats to the family came from a bad relationship between the parents and child-centered parenting (i.e. behavior that acknowledged and dealt with the little person's feelings or fears). Their solution to these percieved threats might be called the Nuclear Rearmament Strategy with all selfishness and inhumanity implicit in such a description. You can read the details here.

Essentially, the Ezzos insist that the "greatest influence parents have on their children is as a husband and wife, rather than as a mother and father". While there are ways in which this is true, the rest of the Ezzos' philosophy is just one particularly rough interpretation on how to honor this relationship in a family. Lest we begin to worry about kids getting liberal ideas, the Ezzos quickly insist:

"This lesson is not promoting egalitarian roles in marriage. Egalitarian is defined as “equality in marriage,” meaning equal leadership as well as sharing common roles at both work and home."

Of course, promoting egalitarian roles in marriage is precisely what the King and I were trying to do. As we worked our way through those first years of marriage, deciding who would do the laundry and who would cook dinner, we realized that "expecting" me to cook dinner just because I stayed home with the kids was another patriarchal way of undervaluing the work I do by caring for our kids.

It didn't come as an epiphany, of course- it emerged through arguments and re-arguments as we learned from our gay friends that a "partnership" is the only way to truly honor one another within a marriage. Our partnership is my favorite place to be in the world- it evolves, changes, and amazes us continuously as we negotiate new ethical qualms and novel interests. The Ezzo-style marriage for us would be a quick route to disenchantment and divorce.

As the group meetings continued, I realized that I was accepting and learning this odd philosophy without studying the source- so I decided to study the source. Who are these Ezzo folks for whom egalitarianism is such a threat? What makes them such supercalifragilistic specimens of humanity? Are they known for their kindness and generosity, like Jimmy Carter? Or their peace-making skills, like Nelson Mandela? Or perhaps even their piety and joyfulness, like Thomas Merton?

What I learned was that the Ezzos did not have a reputation for honesty, truthfulness, and accountability in their longterm relationships. Former elders from churches wrote warning letters to naive, exhausted parents like myself- letters which suggested that snake oil might be part of the package we were purchasing from the Ezzos and their outfit, Growing Families International.

The snake oil really started to stink in 1998. That spring, the conservative, evangelical-minded Christian Research Journal published a report on their extensive evaluation of Growing Families International. While acknowledging GFI’s popularity (over a million reported followers around the world) and noting that “a number of the parenting ideas in GFI materials are sound and have benefited families who have used them”, the article evaluated the widespread controversy associated with the organization. They concluded:  

“GFI has provoked unprecedented public censure from Christian leaders because, although it is not a cult, it has consistently exhibited a pattern of cultic behavior, including Scripture twisting, authoritarianism, exclusivism, isolationism, and physical and emotional endangerment”. 

As far back as 1998, a physician writing for the American Academy of Pediatricians warned that the Babywise method was "linked to dehydration and failure to thrive". This physician, Dr. Matthew T. Aney, expressed his concerns again in 2001 after comparing a chart generated by the Babywisers to one generated by the AAP. But the Ezzos are still winning hearts and minds under the guise of their secular books on the "Babywise" method- essentially the old Biblical parenting without reference to Bible verses or Evangelical terminology.

The truth is that my feminism is not compatible with a parenting philosophy that undervalues emotions and the stuff of the heart.  And I am baffled by the Ezzos' pro-life politics in light of their anti-child parenting. Fear is not a "structure" that little ones need in order to thrive. And love is not manifest in how we hurt or frighten little ones who rely on us for their lives and livelihood.

There is a lot of pressure to consider children who "obey" their parents out of fear as "good kids". Deep down, however, I know that fear can be used to motivate us to do anything in the world, including bombing cities overseas and marching lockstep behind political parties or ideologies. So I bite my lip and accept that my children are usually not the most "obedient" ones in the room. Instead, I focus on their zest for life, their creativity, their strong individual sense of justice, and their love for our family.

Michael Bates expresses my misgivings better than anyone when he shares his own about the "first time obedience" strategy central to the Ezzos' philosophy:

That approach to discipline alienates parents from children, and sets mom and dad up as scorekeepers and penalty managers. I found myself denying myself the enjoyment of time with my brilliant, funny, and beautiful kids for the sake of teaching them a lesson. And a child's natural desire to please mom and dad turns to despair -- the feeling that nothing he does will ever be good enough, so why bother trying?

It is hard to ditch the Ezzo mindset. You're confronted with regrets over years wasted and damage done, as the letter on Quiet Garden discusses. There's also the inner Ezzo nagging you that you're being too lax, too lenient, that you're spoiling your kids. But I'm starting to think that the worst kind of spoilage would be if my child no longer felt connected to me, if my child felt alienated from me, no longer identifying with my values, uninterested in my advice, unwilling to learn from my experiences.

I'd rather work alongside my children, enjoying their company, sharing laughter, and guiding them down the right path -- not like the guy back at the gas station who gave you directions but like the sherpa who is with you step-by-step up the treacherous mountain trail.

While Michael and I probably don't share the same views on other things, we both have that same gross feeling in our stomachs that something is wrong with the extent to which childhood is demonized by the Ezzos. Tomorrow, if you can bear it, I'll share the story of a young mom who sees the world through Ezzo-eyes and what this has helped me to realize about parenting as a feminist, Jesus-loving existentialist who is more convinced of her own ignorance than her sanctity or "savedness". 

[Caveat: I don't believe in hell and I don't think anyone is going there. If you're concerned about my politics or worldview, see my bio for details.]

Revisiting France with Thomas Merton.

"A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire."

Thomas Merton

When I was a young lass, my father took a sabbatical to teach in Nancy, France. Carla and I went along with him and I studied in a French school for the first semester of 7th grade. It was the longest time I'd lived without the sweet Tresor-scented aura of my mom nearby.

From what I remember, 7th grade was the year when all my Catholic school friends started "dating" and tight-rolling their jeans. I was a little bit of a wierdo- the kid who wasn't allowed to watch "Saved By the Bell" or to shave her legs, the one whose mother laughed when she mentioned getting a "perm"- "You don't need all those chemicals in your hair, Alina!"

In a sense, I escaped the pressures of 7th grade girldom in the States and found a whole new world. In this new world, everything you had to do as an American preteen made no sense. My experience with cultural relativity did so much to ease my transition into the teenage years. All those imperatives assumed their proper space within a particular locality and culture. Peer pressure lost its rub on me. 

And my Tuscaloosa friends could not hide their concern when I returned wearing straight-leg jeans and having "grown out" my bangs. The good news is that I found better ways to relate to my friends that by wasting hours "styling our bangs" together. Rather than love them for the way they fit the mold, I was free to love them for the ways in which they were themselves, young girls on the cusp of womanhood with inarticulable dreams and a soft spot for star-filled skies.

My 7th grade class at Lycee Frederic Chopin, where I learned more red-letter words than my parents knew existed in the French language. It was a baptism of fire for me in my puffy red down coat. 

I loved to chew on these anise-flavored twigs for days at a time. I think we were driving through Lorraine on our way to Domremy-la-Poucelle in this photo when the most beautiful storm belly-danced around us. 

Every weekend, we climbed into our car and visited another tiny village. The intensity and rich backdrops of history absorbed me completely. I would just sit with my Walkman and gaze at the amazing stories unfolding around me. It still gives me chills to remember those days and that effervescence that tied me to the soil while leaving me somehow floating above it.

In a park munching on baguettes with Carla and her friends.

Given the sensual awakening of my first love affair with a land, I wasn't surprised to feel a tad of Franc-envie while reading Thomas Merton's The Seven Story Mountain this morning. When ennui sets in, Merton reminds me that "the biggest human tempation is too settle for too little". To settle for marriage without love. To settle for faith without awe. To settle for life without living.

Merton describes his impressions of Cazals, a small village which even today has an estimated population of 160 people. His description captures certain shades of the meaning invoked by the daily wonder we discover when refusing to settle for commercial voyeurism and, rather, delve deeply into the heart and flesh of human culture.

It was an old, old town. Its history went back to the Roman days- which were the times of the martyred saint, its patron. Antoninus had brought Christianity to the Roman colony in this valley, and later he had been martyred in another place, Pamiers, down in the foothills of the Pyrenees, near Prades, where I was born....

The town itself was a labyrinth of narrow streets, lined by old thirteenth century houses, mostly falling into ruin...

Everywhere I went, I was forced, by the disposition of everything around me, to be always at least virtually conscious of the church. Every street pointed more or less inward to the center of the town, to the church... The church has been fitted into the landscape in such a way as to become the keystone of its intelligibility. Its presence imparted a special form, a particular significance to everything else that the eye beheld, to the hills, the forests, the fields, the white cliff of the Rocher d'Anglars and to the red bastion of the Roc Rouge, to the winding river and the green valley.... and the significance thus imparted was a supernatural one.

The whole landscape, unified by the church and its heavenward spire, seemed to say: this is the meaning of all created things: we have been made for no other purpose than that men may use us in raising themselves to God, and in proclaiming the glory of God. We have been fashioned, in all our perfection, each according to his own nature, and all our natures ordered and harmonized together, that man's reason and his love might fit in this one last element, this God-given key to the meaning of the whole world.

And this is exactly how I remember feeling when driving through the French countryside, unassaulted by billboards of girls in bikinis promising that I could look like them if I purchased some product meant to distract me from that trembling little spirit within- the only real and eternal part of me. My parents did more to nourish my heart and soul with these experiences than all the Sunday School sessions in the world combined. By drawing my attention and imagination to history and the varieties of cultural experience, they freed me from an allegiance to "looking good" or "being cool". It's all temporal anyway...

Now, in the present, looking backwards, I wonder how to share this lesson or experience with my children who have been raised in the culture of affluence..... As I plod along, don't be surprised if you find more Merton in the coming days. And don't be too reticent too share how you have found ways to connect your children to the beauty of the eternal in everyday life.

Merton and the mint family.

“We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.”

    Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain    

I am so guilty of seeking the superb stimulations to distract me from the marvels which require me to inhabit and live them, rather than just keep that seat warm on the bleachers of life.

Ono Island and private confessions.

A portrait from a few weekends ago at Ono.

The last week flew by in that characteristic blur of the best writing experiences. Pages upon pages and complete absorption my subject matter. I am trying to re-enter the dailiness of life, and finding it difficult to focus my attention on nothing but the objects and people around me.

Still seeking the subtext. Re-reading Ingmar Bergman's Private Confessions, appreciating how new things strike me upon second readings. The plot is summarized as follows:

Anna, a vivacious, beautiful, and headstrong woman who rushed into her marriage with Henrik - a marriage that, for her, quickly became pleasureless. She feels how truly stifling it is only when she falls passionately in love with Henrik's young friend Tomas. For the first time, she finds pleasure in love; now her husband's touch, even his devotion, has gone from unstimulating to intolerable.

The guilt, however, is at least as thick and heady as the pleasure. Desperate for some joy in either her marriage or her illicit love, Anna embarks on a series of confessions - to her childhood pastor, to her husband, to her mother, to her best friend - seeking the advice or the absolution that will direct her to happiness.

In light of past lights, Anna strikes me for her measured and constant state of panic. At one point, she says something which still turns aorund in my mind as if there remains a meaning to mine or discover. In her words:

"We act out many roles. Some because it's fun, some because others want us to act out these roles. Mostly because we want to protect ourselves.... then I imperceptibly lose what is not a role. When I keep on living, I get away from what is.... myself."

There is some way in which Anna's confession can still be teased and untangled...

Micah, Mark Twain, and an old habit.

Reading Mark Twain's autobiography, which he insisted should be published only after his death- offers a testament to memory and the way it leaves us unhusked and wide open.

Every other paragraph makes me laugh in that salty, happy-taste-life kind of way. Like this one:

“For many years I believed that I remembered helping my grandfather drink his whisky toddy when I was six weeks old but I do not tell about that anymore now; I am growing old and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.”

And then Micah sticks out her tongue when she concentrates on something very hard- and I remember how my grandfather would turn beet-red and tell me to stick my tongue back in my mouth or the flies would lay eggs on it. His advice didn't cure me of the habit of sticking out my tongue when trying very hard to write the perfect letter "B" or to glue a twig back on to the tree from which it tumbled....

A visit to the Alabama Rural Heritage Center.

 

En route to the beach, we bit back into our royal plan of making a pilgrimage to every Rural Studio construction in the state.  So we stopped and spent some time exploring the Alabama Rural Heritage Center in the tiny town of Thomaston. The wide open spaces combine with ingenious construction innovations to produce the effect that made Rural Studio so famous.

The kids explore the handmade local wares.

Unlike other schools of architecture, the Rural Studio celebrates the story which emerges from every single design and construction. In many cases, the designers create a website which reveals the plans and charts the journey through the project. The ARHC building's story, like the audacity of those who first dared to dream it, is preserved eternally at the project website. 

In August of 2003, the Alabama Rural Heritage Foundation, and the Rural Studio of Auburn University began a partnership helped along by a $400,000 grant from HUD with the intent of helping to stimulate economic development in the community of Thomaston. Using less than half of this grant money, five determined Auburn students in the Rural Studio Program, Abbey Barnett, Melissa Harold, Paul Kardous, Nathan Makemson, and Robert White, embarked on a thesis project to design and construct the Alabama Rural Heritage Center (ARHC).

Free experimental beams made from recycled, compacted trash.

Rather than starting from scratch, the students renovated the Home Economics building of the old Marengo County High School and constructed a new 5,000 square-foot addition which includes a gift shop, commercial kitchen, packaging room, and vegetable cleaning/processing area. A separate grant allowed the students to add an outdoor pavilion/deck intended for use by the community.

True to the Sambo's building philosophy, the students' construction process made use of experimental and eco-minded materials, including the free "trash beams" pictured above. 

On April 9, 2005, The Alabama Rural Heritage Foundation celebrated the grand-opening of the new Alabama Rural Heritage Center. 

Max concurred with the ingenuity of offering free meteorites to little people. Each of the kids selected at least two "Alabama meteorites" with accompanying brochure. I crossed my fingers quietly, hoping that the idea for a "meteorite fight" would not leak from my brain to theirs.

The sense of community is enhanced by the prodiguous pamphlets, signs, and cards announcing the work and support of local artists, artisans, and nonprofit centers. Deeply-rooted communities tend to be those that engage us at multiple levels- from our individual preferences and affinities to our group identities and social concerns. 

The gift shop overflowed with the with the creations of local artists, artisans, and traditional crafters. Since many creators leave a business card next to their creations, it's more like a gallery of local creatives than it is a gift shop. The gourmet Mama Nem's Red Pepper Jelly is made and sold in-house.

Local historian and advocate Foster Dickinson collaborated with Nancy Anderson to birth a book/curriculum guide which is now on my wish-list, Treasuring Alabama's Black Belt: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Teaching Place. If you can't find it in stores, I'm sure ARHC wouldn't mind maling a copy in exchange for a phone call and little mullah. 

Hours of operation for the gift ship are Thurday and Friday from 10 am to 4 pm and Saturdays from 10 am to 1 pm.  You can also make purchases by email ([email protected]) or by placing a call to 334-627-3388. The kitchen and dining area are still available for rent if you're seeking a special place to host an event in Alabama. 

The kind lady who eagerly answered all my questions at the gift shop (and who even went so far as to compliment me on my "well-behaved children") explained a little project she had started on the back wall of the old school. This project, the Kid's Korner, featured art for sale by young Alabama kids who donate their creations as a fundraiser for the Center.

When she said the project "wasn't going as well as she had hoped", I had a feeling we'd be mailing some art donations from the Coryell Castle before the tomatoes got fat enough to fall from the vines. If you live locally and find yourself staring at that same "feeling", just write a short note about the artists, scoop up the art, and mail the whole cornucopia to Rural Heritage and Gift Shop, 133 Sixth Avenue, Thomaston, AL 36783.

Otherwise, scurry over to their Facebook page to learn more about upcoming events and opportunities.