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| A special stone on my land CC Jean Stimmell" 4/8/21 |
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"Woke" has become synonymous with political and social awareness among activists in the Black Lives Movement. This innocuous word has become a rallying cry for conservatives, claiming “becoming woke” is part of a sinister plot to privilege blacks and minorities at the expense of white Americans. But it wasn’t always so. Woke used to refer to any class of people who – becoming aware they were given the short end of the stick – organized and fought for justice.
I thought about this while reading about Tillie Olsen, an early feminist writer and working-class activist during the Great Depression. She wrote about how life was stacked against working folks, particularly women, whose every hour of the day was consumed with struggling just to survive. They had no time to stop and think, to say nothing about having time and energy to create. As a result, even “the gifted among women (and men) have remained mute, or never attained full capacity.” She brought to light the vast silence of “those whose waking hours are all struggle for existence; the barely educated; the illiterate; women. Their silence the silence of centuries as to how life was, is, for most of humanity.”1
Tillie was writing about the poor and working-class travails amid the great depression when the future of our democracy was increasingly in doubt. An ideological war was raging. It was dawning on the working class that America’s economic and political system wasn’t working for them. Alternative like socialism and communisms started to sound appealing. She was a voice ahead of her times. Today, we could say she had become “woke.”
On the other side, many prominent individuals and business interests were increasingly drawn toward authoritarian models in Europe like fascism: A top-down system that could restore law and order and keep out the riff-raff. One of those prominent Americans was Charles Lindbergh, who became the leading voice of the American first Committee. Does that sound familiar? It was a group that opposed U.S. Intervention in World War II and was characterized by anti-Semitic, pro-fascist rhetoric.
Much like today, rightwing forces considered politics a zero-sum game, blaming blacks, jews, and immigrants for stealing jobs away from white workers. Even though African Americans were already suffering massive unemployment, some Northern cities called for blacks to be fired and replaced with out-of-work whites. Racial violence became more common, particularly in the South, where lynchings surged.
But blaming fellow Americans for our difficulty only made things worse, threatening our very democracy. Into the breach marched Franklin Roosevelt, who held fireside chats to remind us of what we had in common. Rather than divisive rhetoric, he proposed specific remedies to improve our everyday lives. His New Deal lifted the boats of working people and downtrodden minorities, leading to significant reforms and increased prosperity for most Americans, a trend that continued through the 1960s.
But then, the situation reversed, encapsulated by Ronald Reagan’s declaration that government was not the solution but the problem. Perhaps, by then, government had, in some ways, become bloated, but relentless tax cuts, year after year, coupled with deregulating the guard rails on business that protected the public, soon caused the pendulum to swing the other way, back toward the way it was in the 1930s. As working-class lives have become more precarious while the affluent prospered, workers have once again become “woke” demanding change.
As a consequence, in 2016, we elected a president who promised to address these grievances to make American great again. Unfortunately, he was not interested in instituting policies promoting economic justice for white working folks, or most anyone else. Instead, he ruled by pitting us against another to no good effect except to enrich the monied class, reward his cronies, and flatter his ego by preening in front of adoring audiences..
Now, finally, we have elected a new president who, like Roosevelt, can heal our divided nation. He understands the root of our malaise is the same as it was in the 1930s and the stakes are high: once again, our very democracy is at stake. Toward that end, he has come up with a set of practical policies to put wind in all our sails.
Tillie mourned the vast silence of generations of marginalized poor and working folks of all genders and races, who were never able to contribute their creative gifts to the American experience because life was so difficult that just surviving was a triumph. Now that more of us are finding our voices, it is imperative that we support President Biden’s sweeping proposals to lessen the burden on those of us still left out.
It’s time we all woke up.
xxx
1 1 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/25/books/review/Tillie-Olsen-tell-me-a-riddle.html
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| Jenness Pond: A constant companion in my life CC Jean Stimmell: 2014 |
This essay is about learning how to be useless. As such, it dovetails nicely with a recent piece I wrote on these pages about striving for idleness. I agreed with Mark Taylor’s Buddhist notion that “idleness allows time for the mind to wander to places never before imagined and to return transformed.”1
Being useless, like idleness, is often equated with being old. And, indeed, that is what I am. I spend a lot of time in reverie, which most would call idleness. I have to keep pulling myself back to the present. However, I’m not meditating but practicing what has been called the curse of the old.
I forget where I put my keys. I can’t remember where I left my glasses. I walk into the kitchen from my office and then stand there perplexed, wondering: what was it I came here to do?
Barry Magid suggests that’s okay in a piece called “Uselessness: The Koan of just sitting.”2 His take is, rather than racking your brain to remember what you you think you’re supposed to be doing, just kick back and enjoy the moment. He writes that feeling useless can be a profound experience that we Americans rarely have. Instead, we feel compelled to keep busy doing things: Racing around earning money, having fun, helping others, whatever it may be.
We are convinced that everything must have a purpose. It doesn’t.
To just be – what modern society calls uselessness – means forgetting what we are doing, or in the words of the artist Robert Irwin, “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.” According to Magid, this kind of seeing “involves a loss of boundaries” and a letting go of ourselves as separate observers, “placing us within the midst of the the very landscape” we usually feel separate from. Buddhism calls this intermixing of self and world: “being actualized by myriad things.”
By dissolving these boundaries, we become whole, developing a personalized sense of place, within a community of neighbors, geographical topography, and the more than human world around us. We overcome the curse of our Western heritage that artificially separates our thinking mind from the outside world. That, to me, is the essence of what it means to be alive. Charlene Spretnak in “The Resurgence of the Real,” reinforces this notion, warning us that our hypermodern world is robbing us of our three most critical birthrights: our bodies, nature, and our sense of place.3
As I sit here on my deck writing this, breathing in deeply the almost erotic, earthy scent of spring, I feel one with my body within my sanctuary of place. Meanwhile, so many around me spurn the only flesh and blood body they will ever have, yearning instead for the perfect body projected on the screen of their mind by advertisements and social media. Nature becomes just another accessory, a movie reel backdrop to soap opera lives. Worse yet, as more and more of us scurry around, always looking for the next best place, we are chopping off the roots that make us human.
Indigenous people have always understood that sense of place is the sacred scaffolding upon which one builds a meaningful life. Perhaps, like it or not, that will be the final rallying cry of us Baby Boomers: To promote the importance of sense of place while perfecting the art of being idle and useless.
xxx
1 https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/idleness-waiting-grace/
2 https://tricycle.org/magazine/uselessness/
3 “The Resurgence of the Real” by Charlene Spretnack: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company: 1997.
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| Memorializing dead barred owl with resin replica of human skull CC Jean Stimmell: February 2021 |
I recently got back from two months in San Jose, supporting Russet, whose son, Austin, succumbed to a malevolent brain tumor in January. It has been an extremely taxing, long haul for her, caring for him as he went downhill over the last year.
After returning home, I've been dislocated in time and space, yanked around by a profusion of emotional climates as erratic as the weather, both here and there: From the frigid winter winds blowing across the stark whiteness of Jenness Pond to the feminine softness of mournful, foggy mornings in the Los Gatos mountains.
It didn't help when Coco discovered a dead barred owl behind the house, devoured except for her wings, feet, and head. If owls are prophets, what kind of omen is this?
Then, stranger yet, walking with Coco along Jenness Pond road, the past and present melded together in a surreal collage. It came to me that what journalist Ella McSweeney recently said about Ireland perfectly described what was happening to me: "we live in ghost-land, marked not by what is around to see and hear, but what is not."1
Coco and I inspect the ice-fishing houses out on the pond, soon to be endangered species when the ice melts. When the ice froze last December, Austin was still alive, and barred owl still patrolled my land. We walk further by the little graveyard where my grandparents rest. I am named after my grandfather, who wrote letters in triplicate with carbon paper to his sons when they were serving overseas during WWII.
In one of his letters, Grandfather Jean, who had a gift for words, wrote about Jenness Pond freezing over in December 1942, three years before I was born: "During the night, the Pittsburg Plate Glass Company arrived and laid a solid piece of plate over Jenness Pond, so slick one's eyeballs slide when looking at the pond in the sun…"
Walking along, the dog and I soon come to a beach near where an old colonial used to stand. According to legend, as told by my father, long-ago the farmer who lived there took his two oxen, still yoked together, down to the pond to cool off on a sweltering August day. The cows waded in up to their chests, where they got stuck in quick-sand and sank, in slow motion, to their deaths. According to the story, their bodies were never recovered.
We now pass majestic, dead ash trees, pock-marked by what look like bullet holes fired in a mob boss execution. However, the holes are the handiwork of invasive Emerald Ash Borers, which are pushing the species toward extinction. Sugar maples and hemlocks may soon follow. A new study predicts that in the next 50 years, we will lose one-third of all our animal and plant species.
A little further down the road, we come to a place along the edge of the pond that used to be a gathering spot for local indigenous people in the summer. As kids, we found arrow-heads there. It was also rumored to be the site of an Indian mound, which we could never find. If it still exists, it is now covered up by a palatial new house.
What would these Native Americans think about all the changes the white man has wrought. Could my barred owl be the messenger? According to their legends and myth, the owl is often a symbol of death. In fact, the circles around the eyes of an owl were believed to be made from the fingernails of ghosts.2
Owls were also believed to be messengers from beyond the grave who deliver warnings to people who had broken tribal taboos. I know I have broken taboos my whole life by not living sustainably and in harmony with Mother Earth. Most of us have. We have upset the balance of nature, and now, I'm afraid, we will have to pay the price.
Paraphrasing the refrain from Pete Seeger's acclaimed song about where all the flowers have gone:
"When will we ever learn?"
xxx
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1 https://orionmagazine.org/issue/spring-2021/?mc_cid=94e56c76a6&mc_eid=577f584203
2 http://www.native-languages.org/legends-owl.htm
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| Vultures spreading their wings to soak up the warmth of early morning sun CC Jean Stimmell: Santa Cruz, 2/21 |
I strive for idleness. My best ideas come to me not from hard work but from being unfocused, just lolling around. My creative life, such as it is, coincides with what Mark Taylor tells us in Idleness Waiting Grace: ”Many of the most important thoughts are unintentional—they can be neither solicited nor cajoled but have a rhythm of their own, creeping up, arriving, and leaving when we least expect them.”1
Certain seemingly inconsequential events stick in our minds. For me, one such thing is a TV commercial, from fifty years ago, about margarine: In the ad, Mother Nature, dressed in a gown of white and adorned in a crown of flowers, becomes enraged when she discovers that what she is eating is not real butter but margarine. She bellows, “It’s not nice to fool mother nature,” and proceeds to rain down thunder and lightning upon the evil perpetrators.
That old TV ad came back to mind recently after reading a quote by climate scientist Wally Broecker in Atlantic Magazine: “The climate system is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks.”2 It made me wonder, why aren’t we paying attention to Wally’s warning, speaking in Mother Nature’s behalf.
We have no excuse: We all learned in 2006, if not before, that we were in deep trouble. That’s when Al Gore released, “Inconvenient Truth,” educating us about the dangers of global warming. The documentary was a huge hit, winning two Academy Awards and is still one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time.
Back then, the threat, for some, might have been passed off as conjecture. But now climate change is no longer theoretical but a storm raging all around us, from wildfires to hurricanes to pandemics, of which covid-19 may only be only the first of more deadly plagues to come.3
Despite overwhelming evidence, now so clear to the naked eye, we have done little to change our ways. Part of the complacency is due to big businesses, like the fossil fuel industry, who have worked tirelessly to discredit the whole concept of climate warming because it adversely affects their bottom line. A good argument can be made, along these lines, that the root cause of this is capitalism itself.
However, I think a big part of our denial is hard-wired within us. We are not the higher-order rational beings, we think we are, but mere animals. And like all of our kind, we are driven foremost by our short-term emotions and appetites, not what is best for us in the long run.
To some extent, our short and long-term interests coincide. If we do not eat when we are hungry, we will soon die. If we all stop having sex, the human species will die. Craving material possessions, however, is a more complicated question. Perhaps, being well off provides some security, but our current shop-until-you-drop mentality is beyond the pale, driving global warming, polluting the planet, and depleting scarce resources. My theory is that this shopping obsession is a perversion of a primal instinct left over from our hunter-gatherer days when we had to forage every day to survive.
Whatever the reason, our brains are hard-wired to satisfy these short-term desires. We are like a cunning, old buck who usually makes good decisions but loses his head during rutting season: With his nose glued to the ground, following the scent of a doe in heat, the buck gets crushed by a bus crossing the road.
For us, the bus bearing down on us is climate change.
Many experts say the climate crisis will soon wipe us out. Eminent virologist Frank Fenner4 predicts human extinction will happen next century. A few say this century. And that’s not considering the deadly consequences of war and pestilence. However, most likely, a few of us will survive, living in small, isolated tribes.
Perhaps Mother Nature is orchestrating this scenario to protect her realm by transplanting our primal animal brain into a natural environment where it can thrive, rebooting us as nomadic hunter-gatherers. We will no longer have the means or the opportunity to cook the planet from our flagrant consumption or blow each other up with weapons of mass destruction.
A flock of new books suggests that the American way of life isn’t the pinnacle of existence.5 In his book Affluence without Abundance, James Suzman points out that contemporary indigenous people, like the Australian Bushmen, work only about 15 hours a week with an equal amount of time spent on domestic chores. The rest of the time, they can relax and focus on family, friends, and hobbies.
This atmosphere creates a very different sense of time, as ecologist David Abram tells us. For us, nature is merely a passive backdrop to our lives. But, for indigenous people, the present is all-encompassing: an alive, vibrating “field of intelligence in which our actions participate.”6 While we take yoga or mindfulness classes to live in the present briefly, indigenous people live that way all the time. That’s why some have called hunter-gatherers the happiest humans ever inhabit the earth.6
What a fantastic feeling, being totally alive in the moment without any craving to do or to have! That’s what “idleness”, means to me, not the derogative, modern meaning suggesting sloth. This spaciousness allows us to travel to places we have never been, as expressed so elegantly by Taylor: “Idleness allows time for the mind to wander to places never before imagined and to return transformed.”7
Maybe, with that in mind, going back to our roots is not all bad.
xxx
1 https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/idleness-waiting-grace/
2 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/03/extreme-climate-change-history/617793/
3 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/06/fareed-zakaria-lessons-post-pandemic-world/?arc404=true
4 https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/how-human-extinction-would-change-the-earth/amp/
6 https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/551018759/are-hunter-gatherers-the-happiest-humans-to-inhabit-earth
7 Ibid.
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| Turning toward the light or darkness... CC Jean Stimmell: San Jose 2/21 |
Our lives seem to be fragmenting in the face of spiraling polarization and civil unrest. How do we find what’s authentic in this splintered world of wildly different truths? And what if authenticity, in the traditional sense, no longer exists?
I muse on this question as I meditate on an exquisite, little waterfall near my house. The countless, disparate rivulets within it, rushing pell-mell in every direction, remind me of the incessant deluge of information pelting down on us each day – and the multiple realities they imply.
In Mother Nature’s world, none of these individual rivulets represent the truth: it is only when they are incorporated into a whole that they become what they really are: A waterfall.
It occurs to me that it is the same with us: We can either define our lives like a single rivulet, blocking out and opposing all who are different; or stay flexible, accessing and acknowledging all the rivulets, and then construct them into a coherent whole, as nature has done with her waterfall.
My friend and mentor, Peter Baldwin, psychologist and retired Antioch professor, likes my comparison of my waterfall with the human personality. As he asserts in his book “Four and Twenty Blackbirds,”1 the notion of a single, unchanging personality is a myth. Instead each of us have multiple personalities, some conscious, some not, each behaving much like a rivulet in the waterfall.
These sub-personalities come to life in various guises in response to particular situations. We can see these contrasting personas play out in everyday life by observing how a person acts differently interacting with her child than her lover or differently with his big boss than with his drinking buddies.
Another example is how the holier-than-thou preacher, who by denying the existence of his sexual persona, ends up acting out his erotic urges by sleeping with members of his congregation.
Just as the waterfall integrates countless, disparate parts into a unitary whole, Professor Baldwin’s book does the same for the human personality: It is a primer on how to identify our various parts, negative as well as positive, and then integrate them into a smoothly functioning whole, a prerequisite for becoming self-actualized and fully conscious.
Society, like the individual, is composed of ever-changing components that must work together to be successful. Robert Lifton, a psychiatrist and big-thinker, wrote a prescient book, back in 1993, on this subject: The Protean Self: Human Resilience In An Age Of Fragmentation.
In it, he writes, “we are becoming fluid and many sided. Without quite realizing it, we have been evolving a sense of self appropriate to the restlessness and flux of our time. This mode of being differs radically from that of he past, and enables us to engage in continuous exploration and personal experiment. I have named it the 'protean self' after Proteus, the Greek sea god of many forms".2
Lifton believes that the protean self's flexibility and buoyancy are essential qualities to cope with the stress of ever-quickening social change, the media revolution, and the looming threat of human extinction. He sees our protean ability to evolve as a positive development, allowing us to find meaning and form in this tumultuous age we find ourselves in.
The opposite of the protean self, according to Lifton, is the fundamental self, who, as a result of his rigid and hidebound personality, dismisses ideas or facts that might challenge his worldview.
The fundamentalist wants to keep things the way they’ve always been: “he avoids psychological fragmentation by defending the world against evil.”3 This description brings to mind Trump and his war against immigrants, Muslims, Black-Lives- Matter, women– almost every constituency but white males who have, at least up to now, ruled this country.
The New York Times review of Lifton’s book praises him for “not attempting to wrap up the truth in a simple package.” Instead, it says, the protean self “honors plurality and multiplicity, delighting in the partial and inconsistent meanings revealed by disparate forms and alternative ways of life.”4
Looked at this way, especially after Trump, what’s not to like about having more empathy and compassion for those different from ourselves, whether they are our fellow humans or Mother Earth herself.
xxx
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1 Four and Twenty Blackbirds: Personae Theory and the Understanding of Our Multiple Selves by Peter Baldwin, Ph.D : 1997
2 The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation by Robert Jay Lifton. Basic Books, New York, NY, page1
3 https://www.nytimes.com/1994/02/20/books/keep-your-mind-open.html
4 iibid
The media and disease experts tell us we must take personal responsibility to avoid Covid-19! Gov. Sununu, to no one’s surprise, has taken the same hands-off approach, choosing to treat the pandemic like we do other social ills, like poverty or homelessness, exemplifying our state motto: “Live Free or Die.”
Indeed, some individual behavior is unconscionable, like folks refusing to wear masks and kids flocking to large parties. Yet disease experts stress that responsible leadership is essential because controlling this plague is beyond individual capabilities. That’s why it is so disheartening that after almost a full year, the federal government has yet to provide a coordinated response to establish clear guidelines to protect public health and establish policies like a national infrastructure for testing and tracing – and now, to efficiently distribute the vaccine.
Meanwhile, essential workers and lower-income folks have no choice but to work to put food on the table and a roof over their heads. That makes it impossible for them to comply with social distancing prodigals without financial assistance. The federal government provided such help early on but now have scaled it back when needed most.
Epidemiologist Gregg Gonsalves proposes that the government “pay Americans to stay home if they feel sick, test positive or work for a business that should close for public health reasons to avoid choosing between their health and their bills.”1
Looking at the big picture in our country, it is clear we have over-emphasized the role of individual responsibility. It is morally indefensible to harangue people to lift themselves up by their bootstraps when they have no boots. How do you lift yourself up without a livable wage, adequate healthcare, and sufficient education to compete for a good job.
Nicholas Kristof nailed it when he wrote: “When an infant in three counties in the United States has a shorter life expectancy than an infant in Bangladesh, that’s not because the American newborn is making “bad choices”; it’s because we as a country are.”2
Many people make ‘bad choices” because of hardships and trauma, resulting from being excluded from the American Dream. Isabel Wilkerson’s highly-acclaimed, new book, “Caste: The Origins of Our discontents,” does a masterful job of illuminating how racism has been one such major exclusionary factor baked into our national identity.
Less talked about is how social class is an exclusionary factor. Treating people differently, depending on their status in society, is written into our original Constitution of 1789; it delegated to the states the power to set voting requirements, which, generally, limited this right only to property-owning, white males.
Low-income folks need not apply!
Since then, we’ve passed a lot of amendments to make things more equal. While women and non-white citizens now can vote, they still face discrimination. But those who fail to support themselves remain untouchables, shunned because, it is said, they don’t try hard enough.
As a result, in an unwelcome twist of fate, we now treat our dogs better than our fellow human beings. It wasn’t always so.
Back in our more macho past, dogs were card-carrying members of the untouchable caste: if they were “bad dogs” who growled at their master or disobeyed him, they were often beat or put down – just as blacks were in the days of slavery. Poverty-afflicted humans weren’t treated much better: they were often thrown into prison for being unable to pay their debts, and subject to a precarious lifestyle, putting them at an ever-present risk of dying from malnutrition or exposure to the elements.
But, at least for dogs, we have seen the light. We have discovered that bad character is not baked into “bad dogs:” Rather, it is a function of a bad environment. Consequently, we now rescue tens of thousands of dogs from the south, many of whom were neglected, malnourished, abandoned, abused, or all-of-the-above.
To our surprise, we have found that giving these dogs compassionate care in a safe environment transforms formerly unruly curs into loving, loyal best friends.
The question we have to ask is, when are we going to start treating our fellow humans as well as our dogs?
xxx
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