not native fruit

mocassins, parkas, passwords

I'm reading the autobiography of Mourning Dove, whose English name was Christal Quintasket.  I don't think I've ever heard a prettier name in my life.  I love her book, but I realize that what she describes as her Indian life is not the same as my recent ancestors who knew themselves as part-Indian.  Our people are more accurately described in 'Strong Medicine Speaks' by  Marion Gould and Amy Hill Hearth.  The 'Indians' I knew were those who managed not to be removed, those who had assimilated to at least some degree, enough to pass as 'white' or 'colored' back in the day.  (Please excuse the use of terms.)  Strong Medicine's people had stuck together as a cohesive group enough to claim ancestral lands in southern New Jersey and achieve tribal status.  Our people were more of a remnant.  They may not have lived in tipis or long-houses, or lived surrounded by the skins of animals, etc, etc, but they kept some of their values, knew they were outsiders by the standards of the mainstream culture, and celebrated their difference to varying degrees.  Strong Medicine does a good job of communicating that in her book.  In the case of my mother's father's people, they called themselves 'Moors' and that's what set them apart, or 'represented' their identity as native americans.  As it turns out Spanish ships were in the waters of the Chesapeake - that's why Jamestown was settled forty miles up the river, so it all makes sense, even without the pirate-theories.  My grandfather took the Moorishness quite seriously, but the people today don't seem to.  Even my mother questioned the connection to Moors, but the DNA test certainly seems to support it.  

I've been thinking about other aspects of growing up in our neighborhood.  For one thing, as a child one of the few things I was given that was brand-new were a pair of beaded mocassins.  These were, I was told, very important - they were *my mocassins.*  They used to slip off my feet, however, which annoyed me, and so I said I didn't like them.  Here's this little alien blonde girl, and my mother says to my grandmother very seriously and with some note of disgust, "She doesn't like her mocassins."  I think my mother just decided I had to be raised as white.  Hence she began correcting her mother, "Remember, Mother, you are not to say Kittatinny.  You have to say Blue Mountains from now on."  And my grandmother slid her eyes in my direction with that resentful look.  I guess I think back on all this stuff because when I look in the mirror, I too have a doubt about my native american ancestry.

I look so European, and my father was direct from Europe.  But he wasn't an immigrant.  He didn't belong to any immigrant community.  He didn't have any relatives in this country, or even country-men, with the exception of one cousin who moved here in 1957 and married an American.  He was a seaman and could have settled anywhere.  His top choices were: Brazil, Hawaii, New Zealand, and the Delaware River Valley.  Anyway, I think I've written all this before.

Saying you were German, Irish, English, or Scotch were like 'passwords' in our neighborhood and behind them you could hide your native american blood.  But many of us wore mocassins at home.  We all wore parkas and duffel coats - even my mother gave in and bought me a parka.  Plenty of the kids played lacrosse, whatever their ancestry.  All the little boys carried knives.  I suppose these were holdovers of the old culture in the new, because after all Philadelphia grew up in the context of a Native American community that was not exactly wiped out by the newcomers.  For many years, the two communities existed side by side, mixing at many points, but with the native community moving out onto the fringes, gradually moving further and further into the mountains, mixing it up with other Native communities, whether through cooperation or warfare. The European kids did not usually wear parkas, mocassins, etc., another clue to ancestral identity among those of us who did.  Also, our boys had a higher rate of being carted off to 'reform school' than any other group.

Since I've been engaging in this process of research, I've become much much more aware of the huge loss involved in the Americanizing of the Americas.  It can feel really quite overwhelming at times, but I am heartened by the attitudes of many Native American leaders today who are definitely taking the high road of forgiveness, embracing a sort of mutual-assimilation process (which has been the case all along much more than we generally acknowledge), and have a beautiful vision of a new creation - or a re-creation - of the Native American peoples.

vanity

Vanity is supposed to be one of the characteristics of the Fire Rabbit.  From the Judeo-Christian point of view, this sounds terrible, because Vanity is one of the (evil) passions.  Perhaps this is one of the pitfalls of mixing yr metaphors, and trying to talk about Chinese Astrology and Christian Moral Theology in the same breath.  But wait a minute!  Doesn’t vanity serve a purpose?  Is all vanity harmful to others?  In one of the Christian traditions, the problem is not so much ‘the passions’ but the excess of passion that is the problem.  In that case, an excessive display of vanity might be harmful to others and even to the person all caught up in vanity.  But a certain healthy dose of vanity can be a protection, too.  Sidney Poitier seems to feel it served that purpose in his own life, and it brought him to a better place.  He needed a little ‘vanity’ in order to keep believing in himself when times were tough.  I think we all need to trust the process a little more.  One thing can transform into something else.  It doesn’t mean that the ancient ethical wisdom found, for example, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, can’t act as a guideline, but getting all excessive about it just doesn’t do.  It seems to me that moral rectitude can turn into one of those trouble-making ‘passions’ too.

grackle

When I was in my mid-thirties and realizing after eight years of trying to conceive a child, visiting doctors, adoption agencies, etc, that my husband and I were not going to have children after all, I was very depressed and confused.  I also discovered that I had a terrible physical condition that caused a lot of hormonal imbalance, crying, fatigue, menstrual disorders, and probably contributed to my infertility.  I don’t want to go into the gory details too much, but suffice it to say, I was quite miserable, and extremely disappointed.  Somehow, in my confused little brain, I had had it all figured out that by marrying and having children and providing them with a good home, I would be making up for certain things that had been lacking in my own early life.  And I would be helping to make the world a better place.

During this period in my mid-thirties, I began to realize that these expectations and fantasies about the life I was going to create were actually contributing to my disease.  I grieved the loss of my dreams (and many other losses that piggy-backed onto it) and began to gird up my loins, and make a firm and clear intention to change the way I saw my life, to change my expectations, to try to find a new way of seeing myself and my life.  To heal myself and begin again.

Everywhere I went during this period, I would constantly see a solitary grackle.  I must have seen grackles before, but never really noticed them or thought they were quite ordinary birds, perhaps because they are a simple blackbird in general lineament.  But upon closer observation, I noticed that they had lovely rainbow colors around their necks, a subtle iridescence within their black feathering, and a most startling, sparkling, vivid amber eye.  They made me think of a poem I'd read that included some phrase like, 'to pierce the sour rind' (of life).  I could taste that when I looked at the grackle.  Making the rounds of various parking-lots in my empty circle of household duties, I would spot a grackle again and again.  I began to think of grackles as a kind of ‘totem’ bird in my life. 

silent night

This is my arrangement of 'Silent Night' for the dulcimer.  I felt it was the most appropriate of the carols I've arranged for this season, given that my long-time friend Ruthie died on December 10th.  We had the memorial gathering in her home today.  It was a beautiful event, filled with wonderful people, great food, fantastic photos of Ruthie at all ages.  I feel so fortunate to have gotten to know Ruthie.  She gave me so much, and she lives on in my heart.

SILENT NIGHT

SILENT N, HOLY N ALL IS CALM, ALL IS BRIGHT

4        1    4  1  8     8  5      7    7      4

2        0  2    0 6+   6+ 4      5  5       2

4-5-4 2  4-5-42 8     8 6+    7      7       4

ROUND YON VIRGIN MOTHER AND CHILD

4                  -       4   -  4  4       4           1

3                  -       3   -  2    2       2           0

5                  5      7-6+-54    5        4            2

HOLY INFANT SO TENDER AND MILD

4->                                                   1

3 ->                       2->                     0

5       5    7     6+      5  4    5   4          2

Sleep in heavnly Peace, Sleep in heavnly peace

8 ->                    6+6+    4    4      1    4       1

6+                 6 + 0 0      0   0      0    4 3 1 0

8      10      8       7 – 9     7  -4      2     4      0

SILENT NIGHT, HOLY NIGHT, SHEPHERDS QUAKE AT THE SIGHT

GLORIES STREAM FROM HEAVEN ABOVE, HEAVENLY HOSTS SING ‘ALLELUIA’, CHRIST THE SAVIOR IS BORN, CHRIST THE SAVIOR IS BORN

I hope you enjoy your holidays, whichever ones you celebrate.  We celebrated the Solstice, and remembered Ruthie.

baltic writer on writing

More from Suzanne Brøgger of Denmark, on writing:

"I begin each morning by practising yoga.  And after that - fasting on a lemon - I set about writing, which is only another form of yoga.  Writing is an excellent ritual for training the concentration, memory and observation.  It is an exercise of the capacity to dream and associate, and not least a training in truthfulness.  For I agree with Saul Bellow, that one knows immediately if a sentence has come from the right layer of one's consciousness.  If it has, it straight away begins to breed and flourish on the paper, in that it gives birth to and attracts to it a whole mass of other sentences.  If it is a lie, or you write from a shallow place in your consciousness, then sooner or later you go stale and can write no further.  Sometimes this morning ritual is a catharsis of tears and laughter.  In any case it is an extra dream dimension to everyday life, which allows a person the rare privilege of bathing twice in the same river.  Still I wouldn't attribute to 'writing' any greater importance than to baking bread, knitting a shawl, planting asparagus, or playing the piano."

I'd like to let this paragraph just stand here by itself, because it certainly warrants a singular attention, but I just have to mention what happened on Sunday evening, after I took that solitary contemplative walk through the neighborhood and then returned home.  When I turned back onto my street, I saw the emergency vehicle coming around the corner.  I'm sorry to say it was coming for my neighbor, G., who is only 54 years old.  Apparently he'd had a heart attack and they could not revive him.  I watched his wife cover her face with her hands, I watched them fruitlessly pounding on his chest when adrenaline and electric shock were not enough.  It was such an ordinary night.  A gentle, quiet Sunday evening.

It reminds me of the words of a Spanish-language poet, whose name I don't recall, who was read in translation at "Freight and Salvage," a local folk-music spot in Berkeley, on Saturday night.  I may be paraphrasing, but here is how I remember the lines:  "And those are the good men, the ones who love, and work, and who, on an ordinary day, lay themselves down under the ground."

solitude and healing

My daoist teacher, Jeffrey Yuen, says that healing is a very solitary pursuit.  True, we may need other people around us: health practitioners, therapists of various kinds, and sometimes home-health aides, and of course friends, family, neighbors, but the process of healing is essentially solitary.

Jeffrey says the person who seeks 'healing' is really seeking a certain feeling within him or herself, 'about' him or herself.  And it's true that one can meet people living very vital, busy and even extraordinarily full lives, only to discover that they have some handicap or disease that would cause another person to put the brakes on!  It's all about how we feel about ourselves and within ourselves.

Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig, author of Power in the Helping Professions, has written an article for 'Spring' journal, called 'The Archetype of the Invalid.'  He says that people possess strengths and weaknesses within themselves but often identify with one or the other pole of the spectrum of 'health/strength' or 'illness/weakness.'  He has some interesting things to say.  For one, he remarks that 'the invalid' offers us the gift of time and reflection.  (By the way, 'invalidism' has nothing to do with the actual state of our health or illness, it's more an identification of oneself with the part of ourselves that wants to rest and recuperate/recreate.)  He writes,

"I have a good acquaintance who suffers from a chronic backache.  He is always somewhat depressed, complains of tiredness and he has bad varicose veins.  Actually, it is pleasant to have him around; he makes one feel helpful and useful.  One can do something for him, give him a comfortable chair, a sturdy bed, and he appreciates it.  He is not threatening; he is weak, rather helpless, and not competetive.  He evokes kindness, relaxation.  The archetype of the invalid, when lived out, leads to reflection and to discussion.  For instance, when one suggests a run through the woods to this man, he declines saying: 'I have a backache, and I would rather sit by the fire and chat."

grief

I visited with an old friend over the weekend.  I hadn't seen her for seven years.  She's sixty-five now, still working because she can't afford to retire yet.  Her ex-husband got them into considerable debt, and she's been paying it off.  Life's been so stressful she's developed asthma.  I could hear her breathing during most of our time together.  She looks very very different; in fact, I didn't recognize her at the train station.  When it was time to say good-bye, I very impolitically burst into tears!

It wasn't that I think I'll never see her again; it was just the realization that time is very short.  On this trip, she could only spare a handful of hours to be with me.   And when I go back East, I usually can't spend much more with her.  It isn't just that we want to spend time together and there's so little of it: it's that we met when we were young and at the beginning of things. And now we're not.

She introduced my husband to me.  I knew her during the very positive phase in my life when I was reconciling with a part of my family.  She was moving her life in a very positive direction in terms of her career at that time.  She was moving into a whole new phase of things.  We share some very good memories.  We've stayed in touch with phone calls, brief visits, and a couple of long ones.  We stayed with her when Gray's father died.  She stayed with us for a week right after we bought our house.  We hiked in the Sierra with her on her very first ever backpacking trip.   It was so hard to ...