Women’s Space

An uncensored interview with the amazing Patch Adams. Thanks to Max Dashu, Rachel Lindley Almanas and others who posted this on Facebook, it’s an inspiration. <3

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…in the beginning a political theory is born of genuine feeling, a sense of reality.  But in a state of feeling alone, the knowledge of oppression remains mute, and the reality of oppression is explained away by oppressive theories; it is said, for instance, that members of the working class have failed to raise themselves by their own bootstraps or that poverty is a sign of having sinned against God; of lacking God’s grace.  A theory of liberation must be created to articulate the feeling of oppression, to describe this oppression as real, as unjust, and to point to a cause.  In this way the idea is liberating.  It restores to the oppressed a belief in the self and in the authority of the self to determine what is real.

 

…when a theory is transformed into an ideology, it begins to destroy the self and self-knowledge.  Originally born of feeling, it pretends to float above and around feeling.  Above sensation.  It organizes experience according to itself, it is supposed to know.  To invoke the name of this ideology is to invoke truthfulness.  No one can tell it anything new.  Experience ceases to surprise it, inform it, transform it.  It is annoyed by any detail which does not fit into its world view.  Begun as a cry against the denial of truth, now it denies any truth which does not fit into its scheme.  Begun as a way to restore one’s sense of reality, now it attempts to discipline real people, to remake natural beings after its own image.  All that it fails to explain it records as dangerous.  All that makes it question, it regards as the enemy.  Begun as a theory of liberation, it is threatened by new theories of liberation.  Slowly, it builds a prison for the mind.

 

…who or what one really is ceases to matter to ideology, for ideology gives birth to still another deceit:  the enemy.  …moreover, ideology makes over the real, material enemy – the one who has actual power over our lives, or who actually poses a danger – into an inhuman entity.  Suddenly this enemy ceases to possess any human qualities.  No explanation can be offered, psychologically or materially, for his behavior.  He is evil incarnate, sprung unborn and whole from hell.  We refuse to understand him except as a kind of thing, a force.  …

 

And this enemy is oddly generalized.  Now every male, everyone female, everyone white, everyone black, everyone Chinese, or Jewish is by virtue of biological identification the enemy. 

 

At times the genuine anger of the oppressed also becomes generalized, from the force of experience and time, and for self-protection.  But hatred for a delusory enemy has a different quality.  It is final and relentless; it renders an irreversible judgment in the form of an idea.  …Moreover, because the enemy serves as a mask for hidden thoughts and feelings, new enemies must always be created.  …

 

We live in a society which is built upon a prejudice toward women and peoples of colour, homosexuals, Jewish people, the disabled.  In that society, we are the other.  If we make those who are not oppressed as we are oppressed into enemies, we do not have the power to make them suffer as we do.  …

 

I can be angry.  I can hate.  I can rage.  But the moment I have defined another being as my enemy, I lose … the complexity and subtlety of my vision.  I begin to exist in a closed system.  When anything goes wrong, I blame my enemy. …Slowly all the power in my life begins to be located outside, and my whole being is defined in relation to this outside force…

 

… deeply political knowledge of the world does not lead to a creation of an enemy.  …to create monsters unexplained by circumstance is to forget the political vision which above all explains behavior as emanating from circumstance, a vision which believes in a capacity born to all humans for creation, joy and kindness, in a human nature which, under the right circumstances, can bloom.

 

When a movement for liberation inspires itself chiefly by a hatred for an enemy rather than from this vision of possibility, it begins to defeat itself.  Its very motions cease to be healing.  …its language is no longer liberating.  It begins to require a censorship within itself.  Its ideas of truth become more and more narrow.  And this movement that began with a moving evocation of truth begins to appear fraudulent from the outside, begins to mirror all that it says it opposed, for now, it, too, is an oppressor of certain truths, and speakers, and begins, like the old oppressors, to hide from itself.

 

..I …know that all original thought – political, scientific, poetic – shares one quality.  That is the desire to know the whole truth, to understand and to know what is obscured or what has been forgotten, to take in the unknown.  …this desire to know is perhaps finally a way of loving.  It is intimately connected to an attitude which honors all that is living.  For the desire to know deeply all that is, as part of our outrage over suffering and injustice, accepts the truth, the whole and compassionate being. 

–Susan Griffin from “The Way of All Ideology” in Made from This Earth: An Anthology of Writings by Susan Griffin, Women’s Press Ltd., London 1982

When death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
To buy me, and snaps the purse shut;

When death comes like the measle pox;
When death comes
Like an iceburg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
What is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it is over I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made my life something particular and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

–When Death Comes, by Mary Oliver, from here

Since we live on a farm, we aren’t immediately near what most people would think of as a neighborhood.  We are surrounded by pasture and forestland.  But across the bridge and up the hill, there is a more traditional neighborhood, and in the last decade people have bought land there, built houses for their families.  One of these families was Jamie’s family.  Jamie was my youngest daughter’s age, 8 or so at the time, and Maggie was happy there would be a girl her age living nearby.  What made it even better was, Jamie, like Maggie, was homeschooled, as were her two brothers.

I didn’t much care for the house Jamie’s family built on their acre and a quarter.  It was more appropriate to a suburbs-style housing development than to the eclectic style of this rural peninsula that accommodates all kinds of dwellings — everything from mansions to vacation cottages to old farmhouses to trailers to tent-and-shack constellations, all  nestled side by side as though they belonged near one another (and I think that they do).   But it was fun watching Jamie’s house go up.  Her family lived in an RV for awhile and helped to clear the land and build the house.  We watched as the foundation was poured, the framing went up.  They seemed like pleasant people.

I didn’t much care for the landscaping they put in either; a traditional, homogenously green front lawn, a few rhododendrons, a beauty-barked bed along the porch, nary a dandelion or thistle in sight.  But I liked the herbs Jamie’s mom planted in the garden bed — lavender. sage, rosemary and mint — and I enjoyed watching the family work out there together as they always did.  Their finishing touch, once the house was complete and the landscaping was in, was the installation of an American flag, just not really my cup of tea so far as landscaping goes. But this was the country, different strokes for different folks.

Jamie and Maggie became friends and played together.  My daughter Naomi went to high school with Jamie’s older brother and said he was a good person and well-liked.  Jamie’s dad often worked out in the garage on various projects.  Jamie’s mom was quiet and seemed private, but I hoped to get to know her better one day.  She was kind and thoughtful and had some lovely older-looking tattoos.  The family was Jewish; they faithfully observed the Sabbath beginning at sundown every Friday evening.  They always had dinner guests on Saturday, a house full of folks, cars lining the driveway, and if you’d stop by then for some reason, they’d welcome you and would invite you in.  They had a mezzuzah on their doorframe, a brass fixture that held a small paper scroll with a prayer written on it in Hebrew.  They had unruly, friendly, big dogs.

A couple of years after Jamie moved in we had the horrible, severe winter, with a foot or more of snow and ice on the ground for months and months.  I noticed when I’d encounter Jamie’s dad driving the van in and out of the driveway during this time that he seemed to be driving  a bit fast, almost as though parking it with a vengeance, as though he was upset about something.  I thought maybe this might be some trick to navigating successfully in snow and ice, so I tried it once in my van and ended up in the ditch for several days.

Winter passed, spring passed, summer arrived.  One day I noticed with something of a start that Jamie’s lawn was really overgrown and needed to be mowed (if you’re a lawn-mowing kind of a person).  A little bit later, maybe a couple of weeks, someone — probably the son’s friends — toilet-papered the house.  Oddly, Jamie’s family didn’t remove the toilet paper.  There it was, draping across the newly-planted shrubs and small saplings and across the porch, over the roof.  They didn’t mow the lawn.   I thought they must be on vacation, must be on a trip.  Their RV was still in the driveway, though, as was their van.

Finally I learned Jamie and her family didn’t live there anymore.  Another neighbor girl told Maggie that  “the bank took Jamie’s house back.”

The house has been vacant since Jamie’s family moved out, going on two years now.  It’s new and apparently lovely and quite empty.  You can see furniture still through the windows.  The lawnmower is still near the garage.  The family van stayed parked in the driveway.  The flag still flies.  I’ve felt a pang of sadness every time I passed the house: sadness for Jamie’s family who’d carefully crafted their home and yard with such love and hard work, sadness that Maggie’s friend had moved away and we didn’t know where she had gone, sadness over the silent Sabbaths– the empty driveway, the barren living room, no voices, no laughter.  The new, tender plantings died, became diseased.  The rhododendrons and young fruit trees took ill, became bent and broken, discolored, misshapen.  Jamie’s mom and dad would not have let that happen.

Jamie’s house is one of the thousands, maybe  millions, of homes which give silent and eerie witness to the  egregious greed and fraud in high places of the past decade.  Millions of people are homeless across the country — I see hundreds of them, sleeping on the ground, under the highway overpasses every morning on my way to work — yet thousands of homes, many of them  new, stand vacant.  A few miles from Jamie’s house on the main highway through our peninsula, where the humble, blue Brookdale restaurant used to be, with its artificial flowers and fry-cook-style offerings alongside good coffee and conversation, there are  now not one, not two, but three real estate offices, open daily for business, “with agents available!”  A big billboard placed along the highway a reads, cheerily, “Free Foreclosure Listings!”  I’ve been sure Jamie’s house must be included on this list.

But maybe not.  Another family built a house a year or so ago and moved in across the street from Jamie’s house.  One son, AJ, became friends with my son, Sol.  Sol told me just a few days ago  that AJ told him nobody would ever be able to buy Jamie’s house.   Why?  Because after the bank took the house back — quite a while after — they’d sent someone to take a look.  When the door was opened, a deluge of water washed out in a flood.  The entire downstairs of the two-story stood full of water.  The walls and hardwood floors and cabinetry were destroyed, the appliances ruined.  Mold covered the walls.   “The bank doesn’t know what they’re going to do with it,” AJ said.

Had the bank been willing to work with Jamie’s family, had what was likely an adjustable rate mortgage been modified so that Jamie’s family could make the mortgage payments, or even had the bank just let the family rent for a while, the house and yard would be lovely and sound today.   A family would have a home.  Folks would gather on the Sabbath for rest and dinner.  Dogs would bark and play and romp through the yard.   Herbs and fruit trees would be planted and tended, would grow and bear fruit.  Children would play together, would sell lemonade from lemonade stands, would go to one another’s birthday parties, would be homeschooled or would go to school, would learn, would play the games children play late into the night in the summertime, outside.

Certainly, there  would not have been any flooding inside the house.  Jamie’s dad, after all, was a plumber.

Heart

A few days after my return from Los Angeles following the death of my beloved daughter, Tiffany, on May 7, my youngest daughter, Maggie, and I were driving home from running errands.  I was — as I usually am these days — awash and lost in an agony of grief and sorrow, driving mechanically, as though on autopilot.  We were three or four miles from home.  We’d turned off the main road and were driving down the first of the several bumpy country roads that lead to our farm.   Oblivious though I was,  I noticed something moving near the side of the road, looked, and saw a large, beautiful peacock.   It was running quickly, as though into the path of our car.  I slammed on the brakes, and it scurried off across the road in front of us.   We lost sight of it, then saw in the rearview mirror that it was behind our car, in the middle of the street.  It followed us for a few moments,  running in a lilting, back-and-forth motion, awkwardly graceful, as though following us, chasing us.  Suddenly, as fast as it had appeared in our line of vision, and then behind us, it was gone.   We didn’t see it anywhere.  I assumed it  must have scooted off into the brush on the side of the road.  We told Jenni and others about this experience; it was so odd the way the peacock was suddenly in front of the car, then behind the car, then gone.  I have lived on this rural peninsula since 1991 and this was the first encounter I’d ever had with a peacock.

I got home late this evening from work, just as it was beginning to get dark.  Maggie came in from feeding and watering the animals and said, surprised and  bemused.  “Mom.  Why is there a peacock in our yard?”

I went out to look and sure enough, there he was,  his graceful, long, brilliant-blue neck stretched high, his headfeathers like a crown, trailing his extravagantly beautiful tailfeathers covered with “eyes”.  He tilted his head, regarded us, then continued his investigation of the spaces between the house and the barn.  After a bit, he made his way out into the pasture where the sheep lay peaceably chewing their cuds, then came back near the house again.  I went outside to watch him.  He came very close, within a couple of feet.  He is quite tall, four feet or so from crown to toes.  He has a funny, loud, staccato cry, “Eee-aawlll!  Eee-aawll!,” like a voice, like laughter with an exclamation point.

We don’t live  very near where we saw the peacock the first time, a couple of weeks ago.  That was several miles away.  To get to our home — assuming he’s the same peacock — he’d have had to travel several miles through forestland, along country roads, across bridges or across Huge Creek itself.

I told Maggie, seemed like we should try to figure out what message the peacock might have for us.

I found this:

The Peacock has many legends surrounding its beautiful plumage. Greek mythology tells of Hera giving the peacock its many “eyes” while Chinese mythos says that the blending of the five colors of its feathers is the sweet harmony of sound. The Peacock is also associated with the Phoenix.  In Egypt, the Peacock is linked to the Sun God Ra, and in Christianity, the Peacock is the symbol of death and resurrection. Those who have a Peacock as a totem can receive insight into their past lives and their karmic connection to their current life. The study and use of foot reflexology would also be beneficial as the feet are very pronounced in the Peacock. The Peacock’s loud and raucous call, almost like laughter, reminds us to laugh at life.

And this:

The peacock is a bird of the pheasant family. The male is actually a peacock and the female is a peahen, both are peafowl. The most distinct features of the peacock are its feathers and its eerie call. Two species of peafowl are the blue, or Indian peacock of India and Sri Lanka and the green, or Javanese peacock from Burma to Java. These stunning birds hold an air of self confidence. Their train of tail feathers are brightly colored either a metallic green or blue and formed of the birds upper tail coverts which are enormously elongated. Each feather is tipped with an iridescent eyespot that is ringed with blue and bronze. These eyes represent their ability to see into the past, present and future and can teach those with this medicine how to awaken their clairvoyant gifts. Peacocks have much lore and myth associated with them. Peacock feathers are believed to have protective powers and are used in Indian and Shaman rituals as an aid in healing. A tail feather is moved over a sick or injured person in gentle strokes to remove negative psychic imprints that have attached themselves to a person’s energetic field. Those with this medicine are highly sensitive and proper maintenance of their personal energy field is essential. When an individual with this totem has acquired a strong and solid aura they have the potential to become powerful ritualistic healers. In courtship displays, the cock elevates his tail, which lies under the train thus elevating the train and bringing it forward. At the climax of this display the tail feathers are vibrated, giving the feathers of the train a shimmering appearance and making a rustling sound. This display along with the eerie call of the peacock draws attention to it. They stand with dignity and demand to be noticed. Those with this totem often gain recognition for their talents and have the potential to be prominent leaders in their chosen field. The peacock reminds us to see the beauty in all aspects of life. Its eerie call sounds similar to a laughing screech and reminds us to laugh with life and not take things so seriously. As it presents itself with confidence and awes us with its beauty it teaches us how to keep the ego under control and to set all vanity aside. Past lives associated with superiority has been linked to peacock medicine people. By observing the peacock we can learn to strut our stuff with dignity and grace.

Link, Link, Link

Heart

For all the fathers, grandfathers, husbands, men doing your best to love and care for your children and your children’s mothers in a time of unprecedented upheaval in our culture’s concepts of love, relationship and family, my deepest love, gratitude and abiding respect.  Thank you, and and Happy Father’s Day.

Heart

Some Unsaid Things
Joan Larkin, Amazon Poetry, 1975

I was not going to say
how you lay with me

nor where your hands went
& left their light impressions

nor whose face was white
as a splash of moonlight

nor who spilled the wine
nor whose blood stained the sheet

nor which one of us wept
to set the dark bed rocking

nor what you took me for
nor what I took you for

nor how your fingertips
in me were roots

light roots torn leaves put down—
nor what you tore from me

nor what confusion came
of our twin names

nor will I say whose body
opened, sucked, whispered

like the ocean, unbalancing
what had seemed a safe position

Thanks, Elliot.

“I Never was to Africa,” from Shadows on a Dime, Ferron, 1984