TIMELINES

 How We Become Activists

 

There is a big interest in genealogy and writing life stories these days.  After all, we know things no one else knows.  We have memories of families, traditions and places.  We’ve lived through good times and bad.  We’ve been alive during historical events and hold our own thoughts on what happened and how we felt.

Our stories get set down in scrapbooks and journals.  We share photographs. We visit cemeteries or take road trips to places we once loved well. In the telling, our reminiscences are a moment in Time.  Someone asks, “When did it happen?  What time of year? Who was there?”

Recently Barry and I talked about life events with high school students. We hoped to show that what happens in life can change us in unexpected ways.  To do this, we created panels in a Timeline.  Each panel represented one decade and important things about that particular time.

We started with the 1950’s when we were both three years old.  We lived in a small town during the post-World War II days.  We linked facts and questions about world events, personal events, politics, news and everyday happenings to our memories.

In the 1950’s, it was the Cold War.  As second graders we hid under our desks during air raid drills.  Polio was an epidemic in the US.  “No swimming and no parties.”   Life Magazine showed rows of children and adults in machines called Iron Lungs that kept them breathing.  Then Jonas Salk developed a vaccine for polio and we lined up at school for our shots.  Everyone received the vaccinations.

October 1957 the Russians launched Sputnik, the first artificial Earth satellite.  It shocked the world and especially because the Russians were first in the big race to space.  We students started studying more math and science and got something new in our lives — homework.

The 1950’s timeline covered Civil Rights, Elvis Presley and our individual passions:  rivers, streams, snakes and critters (Barry) and books, libraries, stories and the outside (Gretchen).  

And so the Timeline continued, decade by decade. The high school students identified problems we still puzzle over, still worry about today.  Clean air and water.  Education.  How to solve conflicts.  Bullies and cheats.  What is good for all people?

It’s time to listen even more carefully to our stories and memories and decide which ones are best to live by.

~ NEVER TOO OLD ~

 

A Memory of Music (in Motion)

    

When I was young, 

  the dancing was done

in halls with wooden floors.

In lines and squares, circles

and pairs, the caller was king,

the fiddles could sing and joy

drove the miseries away.

 

~ MAY YOU FIND JOY AND DANCE IN THIS NEW YEAR TO COME ~

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!  

 

 

 

 

   

SUMMER 2022: War and Women

 REMEMBER HER FACE

            What do you see in her gaze? 
Apprehension.  Fear.  Vigilance. 
A woman watching the sky.  Watchful for
planes, great streams of fire,
gathering storm clouds of war.

  

This is how it feels to be a woman in 2022.  We are alone and betrayed by our cultures and societies.  What once was legal -- the right to decide on healthcare and pregnancy -- is now kicked down to the states where abortion may be gleefully outlawed.  Women and medical personnel can be considered criminals for claiming basic healthcare, well-being and respectful decisions about our own bodies. 

It's political.  It's damning.  It's a way to take away women's power.  In this country where we have No universal healthcare, No universal childcare, No guaranteed right of maternal leave after delivery, limiting abortion is basically cruel and stupid -- and deliberately designed to hamstring the freedoms and personal progress of women as equal citizens.  Equal in the "eyes of the law".                                          

 

What's next?  Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is on a vendetta to make contraception illegal. Same-sex marriage illegal.   And who knows what else.             

 

I was a young adult woman before Roe vs. Wade was accepted as law.  Women's choices and sexual behaviors were met with shame, scorn and contempt.  Young women could be disowned by their families.  Some kept their pregnancies secret and gave up their child to adoption.  Some married, successfully or not.  Some sought out illegal abortions.  Some were treated by a "family friendly" physician in a private hospital, a practice I would expect will continue on for those men with power and money.

                   

And the men -- what about the men who are the other half of this equation.  What will you do now?  What did you do then, before?   Did you use contraception?  Did you disappear?  Say:  "Not mine".                                          

 

What is lost in our culture is simple care.  Every decision taken by a woman to carry a pregnancy is complex, laden with emotion and carries consequences -- welcomed or not --for life.   

 

It is not up to Congress or the deliberately skewed Supreme Court to take away liberties already granted.  We, the majority of people in this country who support choice, must stand up to those self-righteous bullies and remove them from office and power now, not in ten or twenty years.

                     

Sometime, someone you know may need a choice.  Where will you stand?

 

~

Note:  The statue used in this entry is in the Zahm Courtyard at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH.  The artist is English sculptor Thomas Bayliss Huxtable-Jones.  It was a gift of the Class of 1943 in memory of their classmates who died in World War II.                 

 

ACT THREE

It's the first day of Spring and I welcome the promise of change in the air.  Our New Hampshire landscape is fresh, running with the water of melting snow and ice.  I walked our road in an early morning chill with mist still covering the beaver pond and the patches of lingering snow at the end of the field. 

What a long and complicated journey since my last blog entry in 2019.  I am not the same woman I was back then.  In fact, there are times when I don't recognize myself now -- older, grey-haired, solemn, curt.  I have no patience with cruelty, deliberate ignorance and division simply out of spite.

This, after three years of man-made horrors and the constant attacks on freedom, compassion and respect for diversity across the world -- and then, the scars of Covid-19, a pandemic turned to political theater, panic and grief.  And now, we face Russia's attack on Ukraine. 

Change and transition. Fear and despair.  The seasons shift and here we are in Spring, a time of hope and wonder, yet we hold our collective breath.  World War III?

Change and transitions and loss.  As I said, it's a long and complicated road we travel moving through light and dark and back to the light, shadows to our right, flames to our left.

Here's a poem I wrote in early 2020.  My mother had just moved to a nursing-rehabilitation facility, her "new home".  But Covid-19 was on the move, too.  March 12, 2020, the center closed to in-person visits.  My mother died a year later. 

 

In March, I last kissed your soft cheek

squeezed your hand,

tucked the quilt about your frail body.

 

Yet all the while, the chill winds blew

fever and fear under the doors

and into the cracks of our lives.

 

Thick glass walls rose up between us.

I watched your eyes meet mine,

steady with grit and shared courage.

 

I smiled and waved,

then looked back --

one last time. 

 

_________ 

 

                                 

THE CORPSE

The Corpse

In our lower field,

within a ring of hair and

trampled earth, lies the body

of a fully-grown, female

moose.

Cause of death?  Brain worm,

the Warden says, that parasite

carried by white-tailed deer and spread

by snails on water grasses.

Pity.

Will you take her away?

Record her death, place and time?

A shake of his head.  No.

No more state biologists here

for moose.

The dead moose still lies

in our field, ignored by bureaucrats.

But what do they know?

Better to heed vultures,

ravens and jays. 

Hear the coyotes who come at dark

to crush her ribs and pull her limbs.

They bay at the moon and stars,

praise and proclaim reverence for

the Goddess.

...as she slowly becomes Earth...

A SLIP OF THE SOUL

   

 Maybe it was because I sat two rows from the front of the church, no one between me and the minister, me and the pulpit, me and the choir in its stall above the congregation.

Or maybe it was because the interior of this building has changed so little from 1860 when it was built and from 1960 when I was girl beginning my journey into church membership.

It may have come through collective family memories deep in my bones.  My grandparents worshiped here from time to time.  My mother and father married in this sanctuary in September 1946.  I married before this same altar in September 1969.

Perhaps my New England roots travel back to 1671 when the Reverend Edward Taylor, a minister-poet, gathered his flock and composed a congregation that bears witness even to this Sunday  two weeks before Easter 2018.

Whatever was stirred within my heart, I slipped in time.  The sun shone through the translucent windows, no grand colors for stern Congregationalists, and lent glory to the white interior.

A patch of deep maroon of the pew to my left glowed.  As the hour passed, those rays moved from cushion to floor covering to blue hymnals to the wooden rails.  Above me I remembered the quiet independence of the balcony, aloof and closer to what -- God?

But mostly I thought how old and anonymous I have become in this space once the stage for my life's great dramas.  Marriage.  Faith.  Illusion and loss.

Here I am being invited to search my soul and join with these others in celebration.  Yet I still sit with strangers and still feel the ousider, even as I marvel at the fire in those memories and mysteries from so long ago.

UPON WRITING WITH YOUNG PEOPLE TODAY

WHAT I LEARN WHEN I WRITE WITH YOUNG PEOPLE

From your shared introductions, I learn Vulnerability.

On your list of Causes, I read Fairness, Equality and Freedom.

When you write, I hear Violence and Fear.

When you leave, I wonder about Gender, Ferocity and the Tribe.

ALONG THE ROAD POEMS...

Cemetery on Sam Hill in Worthington, Massachusetts

For many years, I have written "Along the Road..." poems.  They fit my belief of life being a journey and how we make our own paths by walking, traveling, moving along roads, unexpected or well-worn, throughout our earthly days. 

This past year I lost my way.  For many reasons the road disappeared.  I wandered, wondered and only now edge back to the page to find the words that ground me. 

Along the road in twenty-sixteen,

I somehow lost my way.

Lost my writing, lost my time,

lost my lovely wayward moments.

I wandered through snowy mountains,

 mud and soft Caribbean sands.

Snapped and trapped in the corporate gulag,

one cold Hell and back again.

Write that I lost my father,

thin like leather, gasping for breath

in the downstairs room on Trouble Street

 where breezes carried him birdsong

and the sent of early summer flowers.

* 

In that dry year of twenty-something,

all the bad times re-exploded.

Tell how I lost my temper, flawed

goodwill and old illusions.

Say I still taste the sorrow, 

droning on harsh winter winds.

The soldier sheltering his trauma,

the girl on-guard, alert to fear.

One war ends in wounded peace,

where the grass is ever-greener, 

along the writing road, 

lost in dreams and should-have-beens, 

thick with gifts and demons.

BLESSED BE THE PEACE MAKERS

DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
Click on the Picture to See...
"THE BELOVED COMMUNITY IS THE FRAMEWORK FOR THE FUTURE."

Looking for Root Causes

Spring Valley High School

           October 2015

Unsafe in my school

Unsafe at home.  Rage dogs me,

drags me by the hair

targets me, the throw-away kid.

Someone.  Somewhere.  Hear my story.

NEW HAMPSHIRE IN OCTOBER

IN THE WHITE MOUNTAINS

White pine in granite

anchored by tenacious roots

straight trunk, weathered bark

limbs outstretched in feathered green

surveys the cascades below.

LUNAR ECLIPSE: SEPTEMBER 27, 2015

MIDNIGHT MOON

Adrift on the third 

rock from the sun, we watch

light play the russet

marble suspended in black,

blessed with one luminous edge.

AFTER NEPAL, NOTHING IN LIFE IS THE SAME

The Himalayas from Nagarkot

In March 2015, we traveled with our friends and students from the University of Rhode Island to take part in the Kingian Nonviolence and Conflict Reconciliation Orientation and Core Training in Nagarkot, Nepal.  

We were introduced to the nonviolence philosophy and education of Martin Luther King, Jr. with students, lawyers, educators, social workers, NGO staff, and military officers from Nepal and other countries in Southasia.

After the training, we joined the URI students on a cultural tour of Nepal and then spent time on our own, exploring Kathmandu and the countryside.

As we learned, nothing in life is the same after Nepal. 

Boudhnath Stupa - Kathmandu

On the way to Bhaktapur

The Peacock Paper Factory - Bhaktapur

Namo Buddha - Edge of the Kathmandu Valley

Boys of the LRI School sing "Imagine" by John Lennon.

Chitwan -- On the Border with India

Guardians of the Road

Thamel

Three weeks after we returned home, on Saturday April 25, Nepal was hit with a 7.8 earthquake.  The country has been devastated with loss of life, loss of entire villages, homes and workplaces destroyed, cultural and historical sites gone.

 Swayambhunath is now rubble.

Bhaktapur -- a medieval city is a pile of bricks

People we met now live in tents -- no jobs and no homes going into the monsoon season. 

On the way to Paulines Guesthouse -- all buildings destroyed

Paulines Guesthouse has collapsed.

I find myself caught between tragedy and sorrow, and the utter grace of our trip and its timing.   

It's my koan, a paradox for meditation.  Abandon logical reasoning, the Zen master might say to me.  What happens, then?

A NEPAL COMPASS ROSE

Chhetrapati Chowk

Five dirt roads converge
like five spokes of a great wheel
steer me to Thamel,
Mithro, the booksellers street,
Swayambhnath and Home.

WHAT THE BUDDHISTS TEACH

Cupped hands hold water

a small bowl of memories

cool splash on my face

prayer flags snap and eagles cry

while dreams slip through my cradled fingers.

NAGARKOT

The old Newari man

taps gently at our door

he pours steaming water

from his iron-colored pail

warms the cold night with his smile.

THE TIME TO DIE

...When he was young and handsome...

We buried Stella in the field today, under a foot of soil and two feet of snow.  True to our New Hampshire farm, we hit a sizable rock while digging which became his headstone.  He's nestled into a spot near a small grove of trees, where the grass grows tall in summer. Jessup is buried nearby.

Stella the Fella was 15 years old and failing.  We had dragged our feet but finally made an appointment with the vet to put him down. Tuesday morning. We worried about the car trip.  He hated to ride.  We knew the strange place and smells would terrorize him.  We didn't want his life to end that way.

He must have sensed something.  Stella liked his house, his wood stove, his food dish, and his perch on the top of the couch.  He purred like a lion and threw himself on the floor when he was happy to see you.  Hence, he earned the knickname, "Thud".

In his glory days, he retrieved pipe cleaners and burrowed under the scatter rugs.  He chased his sister and got into all kinds of cat trouble.  When our friend took care of him, Stella left her gifts at the door -- a mouse or its parts.  A sponge to clean up water.  Toys.  Balls.  It was uncanny.

Sunday night, four of us went to bed.  Stella was first.  He chose his usual cozy "hole" in the comforter. Throughout the night, I could feel him stretched out at my feet.

On Monday morning, three of us awoke.  Stella had died during the night, quietly and peacefully, near those who loved him.  He had been warm and snuggled into the quilt.  No mess.  No fuss.  Just a simple passing when it was time for him to go.

We cancelled the vet's appointment.  We washed his dishes and blankets.  We sat and reminisced, laughed and sighed.  We miss him --- this old cat who had the grace and good sense to die at home.

RED SKY AT NIGHT...

sailors' delight...

The writing I really want to do is a gossamer thing there on my desk, a bit to the left, just beyond reach, just out of my vision -- not at the center but somewhere.  Over there.

My old friend the Critic tells me it’s more about discipline and priorities and “if not now, when”.  But these words send me into hiding where I think too much and wonder too much about what it is I want to say on the page, squarely in view, in the here and now. 

The path writing takes buries itself in journals, emails, project overviews and workshop syllabi.  I write informative pieces, short poems, newsletters, art show posters and blog posts.  I’m even writing paragraphs in Spanish as part of my Thursday night classes.

All good.  All fun.  But still, not from the center.

Another, perhaps deeper and more thoughtful voice reminds me:  “Writing is a way of thinking” and “All writing is still writing”.  So, I shift and let the light play on process and the big picture.  I mess about and love the surprises that come, unexpected and bold.

Inch by inch, a space opens where I can live again with writing as a beginner, a veteran and as one who forever traverses the perilous and mysterious stages in between.

THOUGHTS FOR FATHER'S DAY

1954 ~ Otis Reservoir

There's so much more to every story, every memory, every life.  Our stories slip in and out of time and place and fantasy.  I wonder here what is unspoken and unseen.  What sweeps around these two, my brother and me.  

My Grandfather, surprisingly fit, with his cigar and his boat... while we, the "little family" cluster together.

It was another time, so long ago.  I'm seven and my brother, not yet two.  Yet, when I  see these pictures, I smell flat water and a faint whiff of gasoline.  I feel the excitement riding in the boat and remember the deep sheen of mahogany, the splash of water and the wind in our faces.

From then to now, sixty years have passed.  The good, the bad, the tragic.  Some years were rich and full, some long and dark and cold.  

But I'm learning how, in the end, it's never one nor the other.  Nothing's all black, nor all fine and shiny -- it's the mix, the big stew of Life --  the good, the bad, the dull.  And for all the pain, there is also joy, small bright spots of light.  

And, for all I know (or think I know), there is still my unfinished story, full of mysteries and things to come, unseen, unknown, unspoken.

Gods of Greed, Gods of Gold: Some new, Some old.

Photograph by Barry Draper

Lima, Peru   

2005

Lust for gold, dreaming,

scheming tales of wealth and coin

lure conquistadores west,

beneath the blood-red sun.

Theirs by sword, theirs by might. 

Theirs by right and miter.  

Lusting after golden gods, 

gilt beyond the blood-red sun, 

now -- and forever.

WHEN I FEEL MOST ALIVE!

  Santa Elena Canopy Skywalk
First Time in Costa Rica
October 1997

There's been a significant gap in this blog -- for many reasons.  I could say it was the snow and ice, or the below zero temperatures.  January and February brought family concerns, a death, and medical issues.  We found damage from mice and squirrels in the upstairs closet where I keep lovely reminders of our travels, our shared history.

Too, I've been mourning the loss of people I've long admired.  Pete Seeger.  Doris Lessing.  Nelson Mandala.  Dede, the last of the Mirabel sisters from the Dominican Republic.  I wonder how shall we survive in this world without them as living models of conscience and right.

From here it's an easy slide into depression.  All I need is a dose of the world news or the daily flood of email appeals to bury me.  I lose heart.  I lose hope.  I stop writing.

Then, something happens.  Three deer wander through our field.  I catch sight of stars and a sliver of a crescent moon in the hard winter sky.  Good news creeps in and surprises me. Spring comes.  I open the door.  I go back to the page full of wonder and gratitude.

In one of my writing groups, we wrote to the question: "When do I feel most alive?"  I love this question -- it's my antidote to despair -- and I want to go deeply into what makes me feel "alive" and "whole" now, in this stage of my life.

So I start with the memory of walking the rainforest canopy in Santa Elena, Costa Rica, where howler monkeys called and hummingbirds darted through flowers at treetop level.  The suspension bridge shifted and swayed with our movements, but I wasn't afraid.  It rained a bit and stopped.   The mist swirled to the top of the cloud forest and beyond.  The air was rich with spicy smells, flower fragrances, and wet dirt.  And, I was very much alive.

BURN AWAY THE OLD ~ WELCOME THE NEW

                            Along the road of old December

                            when the Ancients walk abroad,

                            I fall in with their company, twelve

                            days and nights astride.

                            Druid, Priestess, Pagan, Fool,

                            Astrologer monk and Hermit king,

                            they who track the star and tide,

                            older, wiser folk than I.

                            We march under darkened skies,

                            a host, a band, a multitude. Claw,

                            hoof, foot and wing, together 

                            journey towards light and spring.

                                        

                            West to east, the Ancients mark

                            the worn, the dying, bygone year.

                            Along the road, the fires burning,

                            turning old and the cold -- to ash.

                                   Welcome!  New Year!  

                                                 

                                        

  

Caring for the Dead: Thoughts on Veterans Day 2013

On the Crown Square in the midst of Edinburgh Castle, I watched an old woman in a tweedy coat and sensible shoes lead a young, freshly-combed boy into the Hall of Honour at the Scottish National War Memorial, an old barracks reshaped into a hallowed place for records and remembrance at the end of the Great War, World War I.

 

The woman and boy had walked through the Gatehouse and up the steep path.  I held a ticket for admission into the castle; but for them there was no monetary fee for entry into the War Memorial.  They moved through the quietness and soft light of stained glass windows. They paused before the great steel Casket in the Shrine room.  They turned as one and trod a familiar way through the Gothic arch to the western hall.  There, among the bays of memorials dedicated to different regiments of the Service, the two stopped. 

Thick red leather-bound books awaited them on low shelves that spanned the stone walls of the room.  The woman reached out a practiced hand and opened one tome to the lone page I expect she has come to know intimately for forty, fifty, sixty years.  With one finger she traced a beloved name, “fairly written”, as the founders of this Memorial decreed, with name, rank, company, dates of birth and death, and place where a brother, father, husband, uncle, fiancé, or lover died. 

           

She spoke with the boy who was studying the bronze plaques on the walls.  Their deed completed, she closed the book gently, took the boy’s hand in hers and left that splendid building created to honor and remember 150,000 Scottish soldiers who died in the War-to-End-All-Wars. 

Now, there are more than 150,000 names.  So many more have been added to the Rolls of Honour throughout the Second World War, Korea, Falkland Islands, Iraq, Afghanistan.  As long as there are soldiers to war and scribes to record, the great books will grow in number, filled with “fairly written” names, dates, and places of death.

July 1, 1916  was the first day of the Battle of the Somme.  In 2006, the ninetieth anniversary was commemorated with dignitaries, the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall and French schoolgirls who scattered red poppy blossoms.  

Members of the military blew whistles and reenacted battle scenes.  Grandsons, great-grandsons, and nephews marched in the footsteps of men gone before them, following trails left in letters, diaries and oral histories.

I thought of the old woman and the boy as I listened to the ceremonies on the radio.  Memories of the Hall of Honour and those thick red leather books filled with fine writing haunted me.  

There were no living veterans of the battle on the Somme River for the anniversary.  No soldiers to relive the hell that began in July 1916.  No warriors to bemoan the battle fought relentlessly until the mud and rain of November forced a halt. 

At the end of it all, the United Kingdom and French Allies had advanced a total of eight miles during the Battle of the Somme.  With a million men dead, the bodies might have stretched from Paris to Berlin to London and back again, never mind how they could form in mountains over that hard-won, eight-mile strip of no man’s land. 

America entered World War I, finally.  One of my grandfathers enlisted on June 3, 1917.  He was a farmer from Tolland, Massachusetts.  He was sent as a soldier to the trenches of France.  He never spoke of his experiences.  

He owned a grocery store. I remember him, a big man dressed in white and covered by a blood and fat-smeared apron.  His passion was the Maine woods where he hunted and fished with a close band of solemn, silent men.  

When my grandfather died, these same men, then bent and frail with age, carried his ashes by canoe and backpack to their hunting lodge.  They buried him there by a big rock at the water’s edge, far from the battlefields of his life. 

Once I read how people grasp things far beyond what is healthy and/ or necessary out of a fear of regret.  We regret our decisions, our choices, speech or inaction.  We fear a shortage of forgiveness.  

Yet, I wonder what could happen if there were no regrets?  What if we all decided not to send young people to war or old people into obscurity?  

What if caring for the Living were as natural and as valued a human trait as is our devotion to the dead.  

No guilt.  No regrets.

What if.