Half the Sky and Yonis

"Ancient Midwives" (2008)

“There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember.   Make an effort to remember.  Or, failing that, invent.”― Monique Wittig

Meg Ryan:  "Would you allow your son to marry a girl who has not been cut?"

Somali mother:  "No. God doesn't allow her not to be circumcised."

From Half of the Sky  Documentary (2012)

I watched Half of the Sky  again, the extraordinary documentary that aired on National Geographic and was produced by journalists Nicolas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, as it is now available on Netflix.  Once again I was impressed with how important this documentary is, how tragic in its scope, and how inspiring to encounter women who have lived through such experiences and become heroes.  What is most inspiring is to realize that at last the terrible inequity of women, especially in poor nations, is at last being addressed.  But there is so very far to go.  This documentary cuts no corners.   As an artist and a feminist, it renews my sense of the importance of  the Return of the Goddess, the need we all have to participate in re-mything culture.

I was particularly impressed with the sequence in Somalia where actress Meg Ryan worked with an amazing Somali nurse who has opened a hospital in Somaliland for women.  She is training midwives, as Somalia has the highest rate of birth fatalities in the world.  Besides malnutrition and lack of any prenatal care, the primary cause for maternal fatality has to do with the fact that girls are castrated from the age of 9 to 13,  in other words their clitoris and labia are cut off and part of their vaginal opening is sutured closed, with the result that scar tissue often causes great difficulty in birth, as well as other health problems like fibula, not to mention that many girls die of infection from the brutal procedure.

How terrible to imagine a deity  that demands women not only cover themselves for shame, but  that women  be punished for having female genitals, the literal source of life, at 7, or 8, or 9 years old?  How terrible to think that this is so in the 21st century, right here and now, and not in some distant feudal past. There are approximately 100 million girls and women who have had this done to them in Africa and the Middle East.  100 million!   And to view this documentary, to see the magnitude of the practice of selling little girls, as young as 4 years old, into brothels...........is to realize that slavery never ended.

And although we are so much more fortunate,  it's important to remember that there are people in Congress right now who want to take away birth control and health benefits, such as mammograms,  from women, who would force a young girl  who has been raped to bear a child.   We need to re-myth our world indeed,  because as the authors of this documentary point out, this is the moral issue of our time.  That's what the Return of the Goddess is about.

Yonis 

Large Carved Yoni on Indian Hill, Anza-Borrego

 Ironically,  I have been interested lately in a archaeological site not far from San Diego, which I was writing about before I viewed HALF THE SKY.  There are a number of native American rock carvings there that they call Yonis**, from the Hindu word for female genitalia.  They are, according to local researchers, "thought to be associated with female fertility".  I think, personally, these Yonis, which can be found world-wide, go beyond tribal women seeking  fertility, and represent a paradigm of reverence for the divine feminine and the processes of birth/death/birth inherant in the Earth, a reverence that  we have lost in patriarchal gender imbalance. 

Yoni near Canebrake, Anza Borrego

"Venus" painting, Chauvet Cave,  30,000  BC

Besides depictions of animals, the earliest human form that occurs in very early art (the cave paintings of Europe and the so called "Venus" figures, such as the Venus of  Willendorf ) are female, often pregnant, and sometimes specifically a vagina shape.  This was more than prehistoric pornography, more than a desire for fertility so the tribe could continue.  This was the prime Deity, the source of life and the womb/tomb to which life returns for rebirth (hence, the importance of sacred caves).  Yoni stones, sometimes natural, sometimes carved, occur throughout the world as  depictions of this  mysterious source of life and pleasure.

This is the Goddess, the Earth Mother, Pachamama, represented in her most primal form. This is where we come from, and to where, in early thinking at least, we returned. I don't believe just women created and honored these shrine/sites that were undoubtedly sacred, and infused with numinous power.  I don't know about the sites in Anza Borrego, but I am pretty sure that many of these "Yoni shrines" were sited as well in places of geomantic power, near a healing spring, or a ley crossing for example, where the sense of the power of the Earth Mother would be most potent.

Mandorla by Judith Anderson

As Riane Eisler wrote in THE CHALICE AND THE BLADE,  by examining the evolution of European and Middle Eastern religious mythology, one can see the gradual co-option of creative "birth" power by patriarchal mythological systems.  A good case may be made that Freud had it wrong:  women do not have penis envy so much as men have had a long, long mythic issue with Uterus envy.   As one studies Greek mythology, for example, the myths that were later adopted by the Romans and survive with great fascination into our day, it becomes evident that the Goddesses became increasingly diminished in status and power as they evolved from earlier times.  Penelope, for instance, whose name means "with a web on her face", was probably an earlier Goddess of fate or prophecy.  But in the later mythos she becomes a faithful wife, weaving a shroud to fend off her suitors.  The male gods begin, like Zeus giving birth to Athena through his head (interesting metaphor) to take on the birth power.  Interestingly, the more patriarchal a culture becomes, the more emphasis there is upon sexual repression and mores - celibacy, chastity,  and virginity for women.   By the time we get to the contemporary Bible, the Gnostic Sophia has been taken out of theology, God has no wife and creates alone, Jesus  is born from a Virgin (whose virginity is then restored) and all manner of restrictions  apply.  With the Protestant Reformation even the Virgin Mary, the inspiration for so many "Notre Dame" cathedrals,  is demoted or eliminated, and Christianity is fully masculinized.  This was around the time of the witch trials,  the Inquisition,  as well.

The Black Stone of Ka’aba - al-Hajr al-Aswad

The Kaaba Stone

Many believe that, speaking of sacred yoni stones that also mark pagan sites, the Kabbah  of  Mecca  is undoubtedly the most famous.  And  ironic, on many levels.

The site of the Kabbah stone is a very ancient Arabian sacred site, that was a point of pilgrimage long before the advent of Islam.  The black stone is probably a meteorite.  It has been broken several times.....as a central icon or power object in the course of Islamic history, it has  been stolen and attacked.  The stone is now reconstructed, and bound together by a silver ligature that is semi-circular (!!!) and measures about 10 inches horizontally and twelve inches vertically.

(Tor Andrae, writing of pre-Islamic Arabia:)

"Ibn al Kelbi reports that Manat was a large stone in the territory of the Hudhail tribe, that Allat was a rectangular stone upon which a Jew used to grind wheat, and that Sa'd was a high block of stone in the desert. In some cases the divinity was identified with a particular part of the natural rock......But specially erected stones might also serve as the dwelling-places of the divinity or the seats of power. The most famous of all of the stone fetishes of Arabia was, of course, the black stone in the sanctuary of Mecca. The Ka'ba was, and still is, a rectangular stone structure. Built into its Eastern corner is the black stone which had been an object of worship for many centuries before Mohammed appropriated the Ka'ba for his new religion, and made the pilgrimage to this holy place one of the pillars of Islam.

(Mohammed: The man and his faith, Tor Andrae, 1936, Translated by Theophil Menzel, 1960, p13-30)***

Pilgrim preparing to kiss the Black Stone

No one really knows what significance this stone, or site (which had, in pagan times, a simple open air shrine in the shape of a cube, hence, the "Kaaba", or Cube, structure of the present day shrine) had to the ancient peoples who made pilgrimage there, except that there were previous traditions of honoring special sites and stones.  Allat  (Al-lat)  was apparently an ancient mother and fertility goddess of the pre-Islamic Arabs at Mecca, although I also read that she was considered an underground goddess, which would perhaps identify her with the Earth Womb. Her name means literally "the Goddess".  Allah means "God, or Creator". This figure of great antiquity is one of a trinity of desert goddesses, the "daughters of Allah" that are named in the Koran. There is evidence as well that the Moon was associated with this Goddess or Goddesses.   Al-Uzza (goddess of the morning star) and Menat (goddess of fate and time) were  the other names of the goddesses in this trilogy.  These deities, as well as Djinn associated with the site, would have  been prominent  in Mecca during Mohammed's lifetime. 

Whether the Kaaba stone was once revered as an ancient earth Yoni or not, it is very interesting symbolically to consider it's current housing and shape.  Jung might have something to say about this.  It is also amazing to consider, from a symbolic point of view, that millions of people, here in one of the most contentious places on earth because of oil, the life-blood of the Mother, annually circle a 4-sided building that houses an ancient stone, possibly once devoted to a local Goddess, that is made of silver like the moon, and is shaped like a Yoni.

Muslim pilgrims, clothed in white,  circle the Kaaba inside the grand mosque in Mecca.
Photo: AP / Hasan Sarbakhshian

Carved Yoni near Solstice Cave, Upper Indian Valley, Anza-Borrego State Park

From the Sixty-Four-Yogini temple at Bheragat.
Madhya Pradesh, 12th century.

Sheela-Na-Gig, Ireland, 11th Century

Medievil Icon - figure is inside a "Vesica Pisces"

** http://home.sandiego.edu/~gennero/Petro.html

***http://www.bible.ca/islam/islam-meteorite-worship.htm

Solarized Shamans and Petroglyphs

Well, here's a shift from the climate change articles I've been reading, which I kind of need to do.......  I love petroglyphs, and in the southwest there are plenty of sites where Anasazi, Hohokum, and Pueblo petroglyphs can be seen.

 One phenomenon I've always found interesting is the "solarized shaman" petroglyph, an image that can be found throughout the world.  I've also run across UFO researchers who claim that these images depict  aliens or people in space helmets, but it's much more likely that they represent shamans who have entered the ecstatic visionary state in order to commune with their spirit helpers, and also while under the influence of sacred herbs that altar consciousness, such as peyote.  

They represent the "halos" that ancient indigenous people no doubt observed around highly energized people, shamans and healers, who were in contact with the spirit world.  Just as we can observe energy fields around people, plants, and even objects with Kirilian photography, so did they.

 

Vicki Noble and "the Cassandra complex"

 

I belong to a group that includes teacher, shaman and artist Vicki Noble, who, along with Karen Vogel, created the Motherpeace Tarot.  She is also the author of numerous books, was the editor of UNCOILING THE SNAKE - Ancient Patterns in Contemporary Women's Lives, was a key presenter at the Goddess Conference I attended in 2011 in Glastonbury, and is on the faculty of the Women's Spirituality Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

With the U.N. Conference on Climate change going on, and the article by Chris Hedges I shared in the previous post, I've been feeling overwhelmed and despairing.  Vicki kindly let me share her comments in response to the article, and my own questions.  I find what she said so helpful.  In the final analysis, all we can really do is ease the suffering, in small ways or great, and that suffering has to include ourselves.    Thank you, Vicki, for many years of dedication and inspiration for  so many, for your dedication to the return of the Goddess.

"I heard something about this (new statistics on climate change)  on NPR last week, and  the part about the anticipated temperature rise. It was so shocking, I thought I hadn’t heard it correctly, especially since there was no analysis or discussion at all, just a passing mention of the 3+ degree rise, and then on to the next item. It’s like a dream I also had last week, in which our whole population was standing at a “fiscal cliff” (I so hate that expression) waiting for an approaching tsunami, as if we were watching a movie. And so it does seem as if we are in a kind of trance state, waiting for the end of the world. (Paralyzed? Disembodied? Stupefied?)

Do you know that they have a medical name for what’s wrong with people like us who keep talking about these frightening possibilities, the inevitable consequences of our actions? It’s called the “Cassandra Complex.” I’ve got it for sure. You know, Cassandra of Troy, the priestess (“seer”) who saw what was coming and tried to warn the inhabitants of her city to no avail; she went crazy with the effort of holding her sight in the face of total denial. At least we’re talking to each other here—a helpful reality check—and taking whatever small steps we can in the direction of awareness, preparation, and change.

It’s a Full Moon Lunar Eclipse tonight, as the Mystery continues to unfold.  
 
In 1999 I left Berkeley after two decades, to move up into the redwoods near Santa Cruz, where I lived in a small cabin chopping wood and building fires in my wood stove, while I pondered the state of my global despair. I thought at the time that surely I am not the only activist left from the 1970s who thought we were going to change things more dramatically—and we didn’t. It was a crushing disappointment for me at the time and I suppose in all honesty, it still is—although I do my best to maintain peacefulness, rather than constant adrenaline. But when Monsanto makes some new inroad into killing off life on the planet, I am once again thrown into a dark mood.

The spiritual practices that I developed while up in those mountains—invocations to the Tibetan Dakinis of the four cardinal directions and the center—have become a mainstay of my current teachings, and at some point I received an answer to my fervent question of, "What should I be doing???"  The loving and very direct response to my question was: "There is nothing to do but alleviate suffering."  So I agreed to do that and came down from the mountains to teach and engage again. Just trying to stay present in the unflinching reality of Cassandra and the priestesses and prophetesses everywhere. Feminist activist spirituality, blessed be!"

 I felt like sharing another piece of guidance that helps me as well.  I received this many years ago (in 1992 actually) and it also seems timely........I keep the little picture below (that's pretty much its actual size) in a frame on my altar.  Of all the icons and magical objects I've collected over the years, it's one of my most important.

 In the fall of 1992 I was working on my own Tarot deck.  I went to a copy shop to make copies of some of the small paintings I had done for the series, among them my version of the "Hermit" card, which I called "Solitude".  It's actually a self portrait, and what the card means to me has to do with the journey of the soul through the darkness of ignorance, pain, confusion, and sometimes the "dark night of the soul".  When we find the light, kindle the flame, that illuminates the way we emerge from the darkness.  Very often this is a solitary journey.   But to simply illuminate the way for ourselves is not enough - having kindled a flame, I believe it's important to share what has been learned.  Perhaps the light we share, the warmth of the flame we contribute, can illuminate the path of another.  We are all pathfinders, and part of the journey is to share what has been learned along the way to  encourage others.   Even in the darkest nights.  What else, ultimately, is there to do?

Color copiers in 1992 were not as advanced as they are now, they often broke down, and copies were a lot more expensive.  So I wasn't surprised when the machine didn't do anything for a few minutes when I was copying this painting.  Finally it spit out a big piece of paper with only a tiny image in the center - the one above.  I called over the technician, who fiddled with the machine, and I finally got my copies.  It wasn't until I got home that I looked at the "mistake" and realized how extraordinary it was that of all things to focus in on, the machine had focused perfectly on the hand bearing a light.

We do get guidance, truly.  I do not know if I have always been true to this gift of guidance, but I never am without my little xerox "mistake", to remind me.

Blessed be.  May we all "bear a light", no matter how difficult.  What else can we do? 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
**The Motherpeace Round Tarot by Vicki Noble and Karen Vogel was one of the first feminine, Goddess-oriented decks, designed to celebrate the Great Mother and Her peaceful, life-loving creatures. It was self-published in 1981 in Berkeley, California and later released in a U. S. Games version in 1984. Like the cyclical ways of nature, the round cards can take on many positions in a reading beyond the usual two choices - upright and reversed.

2012 Reflections: "Stand Still for the Apocalypse"

"Humans must immediately  implement a series of radical measures to halt carbon emissions or prepare for the collapse of entire ecosystems and the displacement, suffering and death of hundreds of millions of the globe's inhabitants, according to a report commissioned by the World Bank. The continued failure to respond aggressively to climate change, the report warns, will mean that the planet will inevitably warm by at least 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, ushering in an apocalypse.

The 84-page document,"Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World  Must Be Avoided," was written for the World Bank by the Potsdam  Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics and  published last week. The picture it paints of a world convulsed by  rising temperatures is a mixture of mass chaos, systems collapse and  medical suffering like that of the worst of the Black Plague, which  in the 14th century killed 30 to 60 percent of Europe's population.  The report came just in time for the 2012  United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Doha, Qatar."

Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist 

 

The U.N. Conference on Climate Change is occurring as I write, and I feel urgently the need to think about the article above from many perspectives.  The Winter Solstice of 2012 is almost upon us, and I've been thinking about what this metaphor actually means.   (And if the world ends  in a little less than a month, I'll learn, if  only briefly, to be more literal and less metaphorical about everything).

But if the world doesn't end with a polar shift, or a vast meteorite,  on the 21st, it does not mean that the prophecy is not true.  Nor does it mean that the metaphor of Dawn and a New Age is not without truth and possibility.  They say that the truth can set us free, and enable us to begin to address the problems, and potentials, of the future. But right now, we're a civilization asleep at the wheel indeed.  Denial is not a strong enough word for the  negligence.  And that Dawn will arise, if it arises, from chaos and a great deal of suffering and loss.

Spider Woman is the creatrix/midwife who, in Hopi prophecy (and the Mayan Calendar and the Hopi Calendar are related) led a small number of people through the kiva (which could be seen as a birth canal) into each of the next worlds.  In some variations of the Pueblo creation myth, the last world ended with a great flood that sank the continents, and Spider Woman taught the few people who emerged into the 4th world (our world) to make boats to survive.**  At all accounts, I believe She has come when She was needed, to teach us the lessons of the great Web of Life, the Unity of all life.  To cast us a shining line.  And now the 4th World is about to end........I do not believe She has abandoned us now. But we must listen and act.

I grew up with the Apocalypse, even as I watched Neil Armstrong go to the moon, and the advent of the Computer Age. I was one of those kids that hid under their desks in the "event of nuclear war", and my father kept a closet full of canned beans and peaches, just in case.  In Berkeley we talked about zero population growth and recycled our paper bags and invented "bulk" foods at the Co-op.  We wanted to save the redwoods, the prairie dogs and spotted owls, to breath clean air.   But no one could have imagined that we could face this.  No one.

The article linked above by Pulitzer prize winning journalist and author Chris Hedges is horrifying.  I think everyone should read it, just as everyone should see "An Inconvenient Truth", which by comparison, is quite polite. I think the time to be polite is over.  If  people have children or grandchildren, and have made that hopeful investment in the future, it's time to think about what they may face.

"A planet wide temperature rise of 4 degrees C—and the report notes that the tepidness of the emission pledges and commitments of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will make such an increase almost inevitable—will cause a precipitous drop in crop yields, along with the loss of many fish species, resulting in widespread hunger and starvation. Hundreds of millions of people will be forced to abandon their homes in coastal areas and on islands that will be submerged as the sea rises. There will be an explosion in diseases such as malaria, cholera and dengue fever. Devastating heat waves and droughts, as well as floods, especially in the tropics, will render parts of the Earth uninhabitable. The rain forest covering the Amazon basin will disappear. Coral reefs will vanish. Numerous animal and plant species, many of which are vital to sustaining human populations, will become extinct. Monstrous storms will eradicate biodiversity, along with whole cities and communities. And as these extreme events begin to occur simultaneously in different regions of the world, the report finds, there will be “unprecedented stresses on human systems.” Global agricultural production will eventually not be able to compensate. Health and emergency systems, as well as institutions designed to maintain social cohesion and law and order, will crumble. The world’s poor, at first, will suffer the most. But we all will succumb in the end to the folly and hubris of the Industrial Age. And yet, we do nothing."

I'm not the first person to say it, but it needs to be said again and again, and be a required class and discussion in every school.  How can we teach the young geometry and literature, and leave them unprepared in every way for the reality of ecological disaster?  It's not a nice theoretical problem for them, it's their future.  Our civilization, which is now global, which affords us such unprecedented wealth, food, longevity, and novelty....is not sustainable.  We cannot evolve to survive the technological age unless we can evolve spiritually to meet the challenge, and we're, according to some, plain out of time. 

A corporatocracy and the bottom line is not a fit, ethical, or visionary leader, and yet, that is what, essentially, we have rendered our power over to.  Our civilization is not sustainable.  Not because of wall street, or outsourcing, or devaluation of the dollar or the euro.  It's not sustainable because the polar ice caps are melting, and the snows of Kilimanjaro are almost gone, and we continue to burn coal.  Because too many life forms that weave the web of ecosystems are rapidly becoming extinct, and the Great Coral Reef is dying, and no one can imagine getting the kids to school without an SUV.  And because the environment wasn't even in the presidential debates.  

How does one, really, come to grips with this?   There are many who are trying, who offer hopeful seeds.  How can we break the "sound of silence", wake each other up and demand justice, not only human justice, but for all living beings, for the great, brilliant, blue planet that is more than our home, but our life and our mother and our own being.  For Gaia.............

**"Taiowa sent Spider Woman to talk to the people who still carried the Creator’s song in their hearts. She taught them how to build large boats out of reeds. This, they did, and when their boats were sealed, the waters began to flood the world. The noise of the rushing waters was incredible.  Large continents sunk and broke apart into small islands. Incredible rains fell. Then it stopped, and there was silence. The reed boats drifted the people ove r t h e s i l e n t waters for a long time.  When their boats finally stopped on a new coastline, the people walked onto the dry lands for the first time."

*** This morning I went to work on a shower I'm tiling in a trailor.  The tiles are in a box on a table outside, and seemingly hovering above the tiles in the box was a seed, the kind that you see drift by in a good breeze.  I was amazed that it stayed right there, until I realized it was suspended by a single transparent spider thread.  What a lovely metaphor........for me, for all.  To be the seeds, suspended and sustained by the Threads of Tse Che Nako.

Levitation?

 Recently I had one of those conversations about how, and why, the ancients went to such trouble to built temples and pyramids, from Gobekli Tepe (12,000 years old) to Stonehenge (5,000 to 6,000 years ago) to the astonishing discovery of a pyramid complex in Bosnia.  As always, the discussion includes the question "How did they do it?".

Some excellent work has been done (literally) by archeologists who have sought to answer this question about the Great Pyramid in Egypt, as well as the transport  and shaping of the huge megaliths that form Stonehenge.  It's been demonstrated how they might have done it with ropes, levers, and generations of people with a very fierce determination to get the job done. 

But many people believe that, just as the ancients understood the unique properties and geo-magnetic energy currents of sacred places in ways that we have lost, so too they may have had a capacity to move stone and work stone in ways that we no longer understand.

Is levitation of stones only something that can happen in a fantasy novel?  How about the Sufi temple just outside of Pune, India, whose members have been "levitating" a stone weighing 170 pounds daily for many years?  They are very specific about how they do it - they work in groups of 11, and have a sacred song/mantra they together chant while performing this remarkable feat, which a participant (V.S. Gopalakrishnan) described as "very light":

"No single person can lift any of the stones from the ground with all the ten fingers, heavy indeed as they are.  How do the stones ‘levitate’? The word ‘levitate’ is perhaps a misnomer because they do not go up from the ground by themselves. Then, what is the miracle about the stones? My younger son of about 10 years and I were keen participants in the mystery-act. Any eleven males (including boys) could stand around the big stone lying on the ground. Each person has to simply bend down and ‘gently’ touch the stone with just one index finger. The touching has to be in the bottom half, not the top portion of the stone. After the eleven people thus touch the stone, all of them have to utter, in unison and loudly, the expression, “Kamarali Darvesh”. My experience was incredible. The stone rises up to eight feet before falling to the ground. While the stone was rising, your index finger feels very light and there is no pressure on it. It was as if some spiritual force through the eleven of us was guiding the stone to rise up. Why does it fall after going up eight feet or so? It is because our finger can no longer touch it above that height."

 http://morris108.wordpress.com/2008/06/11/pictures-sufis-really-levitating-an-80-kilo-stone-india/

The author of the Blog above commented that  he believed any group of people could, like in "Table Tipping", perform this feat of levitation,  but we are no longer able to group together and concentrate together in such a manner - that the combined energy of the group is needed.

And then there's the Latvian emigrant Edward Leedskalnin (1887 to 1951) , a small and solitary man who managed to carve and raise huge blocks of limestone  to build the monument that's come to be called  Coral Castle in Florida. He was also known for his theories on magnetism.  Like Simon Rodia in Los Angeles who created the amazing Watts Towers in his backyard, Leedskalnin's life work was creating his "castle", but unlike Rodia, no one can figure out how he did it, as the mysterious Leedskalnin worked at night, and was very secretive about allowing others to see him at work.  He commented that he "knew the secrets of the great pyramids", but if he did, he never shared them and took them to his grave.

Mysteries...............

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_Castle

Thanks Giving

image by Joel Barker

As I contemplate the end of November, the immanent closing of the year ~ the only place to arrive at is  GRATITUDE. No matter how I complain, finally, Gratitude is the soil, the enzyme, the only appropriate medium to plant any seed in.  And the tide that takes us to sea as well......

  Starfish
    
by Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, "Last night,
the channel was full of starfish."  And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life’s way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won’t give you smart or brave,
so you’ll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
were born at a good time. Because you were able
to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have and started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

Reflections on Loss of Community

"The paradox of our time in history is that we spend more,but have less, buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We've learned how to make a living, but not a life. We've added years to life not life to years. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We write more, but learn less. We've learned to rush, but not to wait"

George Carlin

I find I am reluctant to sell my motor home, because it represented a dream I had of finding a more friendly life in a small town in New Mexico. I don't know if it would have worked out that way, but I think it might.  But the truth is I can't leave Tucson now not only because of responsibilities to my mother, but economic realities as well.  And yet, I've never really felt "at home" here, never really been able to find any kind of lasting community. 

I once had an astrologer do an Astro-Cartography chart for me.  Turned out the worst places I could be in the world were Phoenix and Indianapolis, with Saudi Arabia being a bad choice too.  Well, I'm only 100 miles from Phoenix ..........but if I went to New Mexico, or back to Northern California, would things really be different?  I'd  over 60 now, and the world is a different place.   I think it's very difficult for many people to find community now, and loneliness, in spite of our "instant connections" is increasingly pernicious in American society.  And its something no one talks about, because it's both subtle and embarrousing.  If you feel isolated it must be your fault, right?  

I come from a generation and time that lived in communal houses, and was big on co-ops.  And yet, all these years later, I find myself living in a house in a neighborhood where I know no one.  When my mother lived here she never knew her neighbors, and they don't want to know me either.  

I don't know when it happened, but I don't send out emails about my new work, blog posts, or even interesting tidbits of information any more because......well, we all know that it would fall among hundreds of emails.  The assumption, somewhere along the line, I came to make  is that no one has time to read my emails any more, and if they do, they don't have time to respond.    And yet........I remember when I used to write long letters to people, when people did that.  

I feel the same way about calling people  unless I have a specific reason to exchange information. In the "Information Age" that's a real BUZZWORD.   The serpentine undulations and spiral logic of the art of conversation are lost in such a world that values "information" and "getting things accomplished" above all else.

I go to the coffee shop now and confront rows of impregnable laptops, and it seems to me that the days of just hanging out are over.    I join groups and listen to speakers, but that never seems to become one-on-one either.  You listen, everyone gets their 1.5 minute of question and answer, and then you go home.   If I find it frustrating, it's because I'm an anachonism already. 

The function of this blog has been to explore connection, the often invisible strands of Spider Woman's Web.  But I like to have my occasional rant about dis-connection as well.

"Americans' circle of close confidants has shrunk dramatically in the past two decades and the number of people who say they have no one with whom to discuss important matters has more than doubled, according to a new study by sociologists at the University of Arizona. "The evidence shows that Americans have fewer confidants" said Lynn Smith-Lovin, one of the study's authors. "This change indicates something that's not good for our society. Ties with a close network of people create a safety net. These ties also lead to civic engagement and local political action."

The study compared data from 1985 and 2004 and found that the number of people with whom Americans can discuss matters important to them dropped by nearly one-third, from 2.94 people in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. Researchers also found that the number of people who said they had no one with whom to discuss such matters more than doubled, to nearly 25 percent. The survey found that both family and non-family connections dropped, with the greatest loss in non-family connections."

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Loneliness-Is-Getting-Rampant-in-America-27518.shtml 

Recently I  re-connected with two friends from college.  One I haven't seen in 25 years, the other in 10.   She said she was coming to Tucson for a concert and the Dia de Los Muertos parade.  I made up the guest room and  looked forward, I suppose, to a long discussion about where we've been since graduate school.  Instead we rushed to the parade, spent a lot of time trying to park, had time for a brief drink, then they both rushed to their concert, and I got an email a few days later saying how great it was to re-connect.

Well, I guess so.  That seems to be how it's done these days............?  Kind of like Facebook.  Abreviated, condensed.   Why should I be disappointed?

The busy, busy, busy  indifference of our world is sometimes amazing to me.   I pulled up a few past entries I wrote on the subject. I think creating community is a very important endeavor today, but it's not really easy at all, because the drift of our culture is going in the opposite direction.

May, 2010:

 Yesterday I saw something that happens everyday, but it stayed with me.

 I was looking for a post office, which I found.  There was a long line, and a nice looking gentleman, with a badge that said "Allesandro" was the "maitre'd" of the operation.  In the section between the postal tellers and the long  line was an older woman in a wheelchair.......I could see that she often came to the post office because she knew everyone's names, and in that unfortunate and busy place, she was trying to engage the tellers and Allesandro with conversation by asking a lot of questions about mailing options, asking where the bathroom was, and making some personal comments in the hope of response.  The people in line were annoyed because she was taking up time, and space, and the tellers smirked.  Finally she apologized, and told everyone she was "under the influence of legal drugs", meaning I assume painkillers, and away she rolled, looking embarrassed, down the street.

I didn't think she seemed like a crazy person............on the contrary, she had an intelligent face and a pleasant voice.  She was just desperately lonely, and here was a place with people who were "familiar", and where the hum of  activity was going on.  She was like a stray dog, hoping for a scrap of affection or attention in a place where she surely wasn't going to get it.

Did I do anything?  No, but I sympathized.   I have a better social mask than her, and I have legs and a car, so I'm better off.  People like the Post Office lady have fallen through the cracks.  Am I the only one who saw her, was she invisible to everyone else?

 I should have asked her  to have coffee with me.  Maybe I would have found her disturbing, or it would have taken "time from my busy life".  But I might have learned something, been touched in some way.  I suspect, if I had, she would have looked at me with something akin to terror or suspicion, and refused. Maybe I should have tried anyway.

Here's another entry I found that kind of addresses the issue as well.  I still miss the "Tempe Beach". 

 August, 2008:

Tempe is the home of ASU, a mega-university, and is part of the vast sprawling urban complex that Phoenix has become. But my memories there go back to when I was a child, and one of my fondest memories was  the "Beach".

Back then, Tempe was just a little college town, and in the '50's, only rich people (very few of whom lived in Tempe) could afford a private swimming pool. The Tempe Beach was a huge public swimming pool that took up a whole block, and in the summer, when it was too hot to swim in the day, as soon as the sun went down families arrived with towels in hand, to swim, and eat hot dogs and ice cream from stands at the "Beach". It was a riotous scene of kids in plastic swimming caps and boxer shorts leaping in and out of the pool, a legion of life guards, flirtatious college students posing for each other, and young families socializing at picnic tables.

The "Beach" is long gone, and private swimming pools are  common now, and people can swim with all the "privacy" they could want in their own back yard, along with spending a lot of time and money maintaining that privacy (not to mention the enormously wasteful water use all this "privacy" requires). But I think, even with the obsession Americans seem to have with insulating themselves thoroughly from contact with "strangers" - that there are a few people like myself, who remember the color, fun, and crowds of the "Beach".

The demise of the "Tempe Beach" reminds me of the demise of the "diners" my mother still remembers fondly. Breakfast, for her as a young working woman, involved a whole community of people cooperating to share an experience called "breakfast". Her eggs came with a waitress, cooks, dishwashers, and the regulars she got to know by virtue of eating there regularly.  A  disposable egg mac muffin and a throwaway coffee alone in the car on the way to work may be more convenient.......but is it better? 

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Well, I do have to add that somethings are, indeed, better.  The Tempe Beach was, in its early days, segregated.  That's a huge change for the better.