not native fruit

many stories

as i continue to read and do research in the area of my family history, i realize more and more just how many and varied the stories are, yet to each of us it seems as if our own story is 'the' story.  Whether it's the stories of former slaves, of the various native american tribes, of the 'mulattos,' and probably even of the oppressors, there are unique experiences in every region.  back east, there must be unique experiences about every twenty square miles.  i am finding it fascinating to read all these different accounts, often finding something i can relate to, or that applies to my family.  of course, i am mostly reading about the east coast where my mother's people are from.

i now realize that my mother's father's people, in particular, come closest to what used to be called 'free people of color,' or sometimes 'the intermediate class.'  dr. pauli murray, a harvard graduate, writes a great deal about free people of color and also about slave-mulattos (the progeny of white slave-owners and their slaves) in her book 'proud shoes.'  one of the most poignant, for me, stories in the book relates to how much the offspring of the family that endowed or founded the university of north carolina longed to partake of its education, but could not, because of their color-status.  even dr. murray was turned down by the institution when she applied, and she had to take her undergraduate degree elsewhere.  she chose a good school, but still the pain of applying to a school created by your own direct ancestor and being rejected despite her excellent qualifications - i'm sorry, but that is just totally dysfunctional to say the least.  later she graduated from harvard law school, no mean feat.  

i'd like to share with you a site dedicated to a people i feel are very familiar to me.  it's called 'the minqua people of the welsh mountains of southeastern pennsylvania' and here is the link.  these are some lovely, gracious people, people i know both of my parents respected to the nines because of their excellent values and manner of living, and my mother felt herself and her family to be a part of.  i hope you'll enjoy the site as it gets rolling.

poetry of ancient/indigenous language

shelly de paul, a teacher of the lenape language in pennsylvania and online, has said that she finds the ancient languages powerful.  Words have power.  And that she began her study of lenape in order to write poetry. 

this is a sentiment I can definitely get behind.  i've also been wanting to find my poetic music in lenape.  i'm sure it will come.  in fact, it's already happening.

also, i've had a breakthrough in terms of communicating my feelings about my connection with the lenape.  i've been a bit sensitive to intimations on the part of 'others' that i may be a lenape wannabe, etcetera. 

what i've realized is that i've realized how much more our native heritage meant to my mother and my grandparents, and their parents.  it meant a lot to them, enough to keep it a secret from me, but to enjoy the secret secretly among themselves.  i've realized how much more it meant to me than i ever recognized or acknowledged, surrounded as i was by the land and the community of the lenape remnant in the philadelphia area. 

i can't not acknowledge that. 

not only have these realizations, recognitions and awakenings filled in many of the blanks in my story, but they have reduced my anxiety and my need to please others.  there's some way in which this experience has made me more whole, so it must be good.  therefore i will continue on this path.

that's simple, that's clear.  this clarity helps me.

'weli kishku' ~ have a nice day!

love medicine by louise erdrich

i've just finished reading Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich.  this was her first novel, i believe, and as such, it is rather raw yet extremely beautiful and powerful at the same time.  this book has got to be a classic.

part of the reason i feel it has been so important for me to read, is because it's given me a chance to process a lot of my feelings about the native american element in my own life: my feelings of loss, because my life took me away from 'native america' for so many years and yet has brought me around full circle back to it.  so there is wonder, grief, regret, joy and appreciation in the experience for me.

also, this book allows me to vicariously live the life i might've lived - or something close to it, since our tribe does not have any reservations anymore - if my coloring had been a little different so that i was more obviously a part of our group, or if my mother had given me more instruction in the correct etiquette to observe.  i really do understand why she may have hesitated to tell me the truth in the first place.  you had to be there, perhaps, to know what i mean.  but the book allowed me to imagine what may have happened in the lives of Angie, Philip, the Hammonds, Andersons, Strausses and Moores.  It allowed me to remember Ronny R, Christine K, the Scul---ys, and others.  not that i would have wanted to have their lives, because, in fact, they were very difficult.  i've had my problems too, but i've also had the way out.

in the book, there is a character who doesn't know his parentage.  he's been adopted and raised by the woman who is really his great-aunt, a woman known for taking in strays.  the reader is clued in from the beginning as to who his mother is, so the reader knows he really is a part of the family, but the character doesn't learn the identities of his mother and father until the end of the book. his process, while somewhat different from mine, is also somewhat similar, and i found it helpful to walk through that process with him. 

one of the important lessons for me in his story is to recognize, along with him, that the child (of his mother) who was acknowledged has had a very tough road to tread, while he, who was her secret child, slipped under the radar and was allowed to live his own life, be his own self, and find his own way back to his parents and ultimately to himself.

i found the whole book really healing for me to read.  not always easy, by any means.  but extremely rewarding.  i highly recommend it to anyone interested in native american lives, or just in human life, or simply in the most masterful level of writing.

grandmother's gift / nostalgia

my grandmother katie, gnarled with arthritis, sat in her rocking chair - orange-painted in the moorish style - on our front porch nearly every evening in the summertime and on, into the early fall.  She gently rocked herself just a little bit, looking pensive, sometimes bitter, and always very far away.  Loud sounds, sudden movements, racket from the neighborhood children could disturb her reverie.  

after i'd grown up, i sometimes wondered if she had been mentally ill or just plain mean, but after i did some work with an emdr therapist, i realized that she was simply more identified with an earlier time and place in her life, and she wished to 'be there' in reverie so much that she was very much put out when she was brought back to the present by one of us.

this realization led to the awareness that both she and my mother were very much identified with the mountains, with the people there, and with all their secrets.  at any rate, ever so much of my mother and grandmother's reality was kept a secret from me, but being a part of them, i could feel a lot of it, just couldn't put it into words.  out of frustration at my constant feeling of exclusion, i tried to reject them.  at different times in my life, i've realized that i can't reject them, because they are just too much a part of me.  they belong to me, and i belong to them, and i might as well accept that fact.

and now, wonder of wonders, i find myself feeding on nostalgia in my later years, just like grandma.

to help me understand my own experience, i'm reading a book about nostalgia called "Yesterday's Self" by Andrea Deciu Ritivoi (Philosophy, Sociology, Literary Studies).  the author considers how nostalgia may play a role in helping us to integrate our ongoing identity especially when there has been a rupture of some sort in our process like becoming a refugee, a war-bride, an exile, or experiencing a trauma in relation to immigration or some other major change of place. 

at one time nostalgia was indeed considered to be a medical (psychiatric) condition, at another time it indicated that you were a person of superior sensibility, an artist perhaps.  the book goes on to discuss all sorts of interesting aspects forming the notion of identity.  can you believe there are people spending their lives thinking about 'identity' and getting paid to do so? 

i've only read the first couple of chapters, but in them the author promises to share with us from the stories of two women who immigrated to the united states from poland after the second world war, one of whom felt that her identity was indissolubly linked with poland and with the person she had been there, while the other woman finds links in her new american life with the self she once was in poland, thus carrying her polish identity forward into its new form in america.  sounds like this comparison will be interesting.  the author loves literature and wishes also to look at two literary figures, odysseus and robinson crusoe, to further explore the notions of identity and nostalgia. having been, at one time in my life, a philosophy major at uc berkeley when the mind-brain identity theory was hot, i find this book riveting.  i will keep you posted.

darkness

darkness,
at the hub of things,
don't let me forget you.
darkness,
womb of every thought,
don't let me shut you out
with light.
silence,
in the darkness,
our true home,
welcome me,
comfort me,
center me
in all that we are.

*    *    *

i'd like to say a brief word in prose here about darkness.  a spiritual-minded acquaintance of mine once said that my love of 'darkness' scared her.  her spiritual tradition favored light.  it seems to me now that some spiritual traditions demonize the darkness.  therefore people might get the totally wrong idea that i am somehow singing the praises of evil-doing, which is far from the case.  i do believe that our misapprehension of darkness might be at the root of more evil-doing than we care to admit, since so much of that is done in the shining, blinding light of day, in the shimmer of success, wealth and glory.  we often can't make peace with the darkness and the silence, and seek something else.  but then there's all kinds of wrongness and some of it is darkness-bred, too.  but evil-doing is not partial to either darkness or light, it makes use of both and itself operates on another principle altogether.

some of my happiest memories have to do with darkness.  the darkness of the ocean at night.  driving along the old two-lane road that skirted the beach in south jersey, with the sparse colored lights in the distance, before and behind, of tiny resort towns with their small modest boardwalk piers.  the only sound was the soft soughing of the waves, and the tiny distant lights were white, yellow, occasionally red, green or blue, trailing out into the sea. well, it was another time and place.

the darkness of my childhood garden at night, lit by stars and fireflies, ringed by the black canyon of our brick two- and three-story houses.

now, the darkness resting on the trees outside my bedroom window, their leaves lit only by the moon.

one of the things i particularly have loved about my spiritual beacon, Amma, is that while she can radiate intense decibels of light, she also has a profound darkness about her.  her skin and hair are dark, true, that's part of it.  she is mysterious and unknowable, that's another part of it.  but perhaps especially, for me, it is that her story has so much darkness in it.  she grew up along the seashore in south india, in a place without electricity until perhaps the late nineteen-seventies, and then very little of it. there was the poverty and 'ignorance' of the fishing-folk she grew up among. the 'darkness' of living in a remote, primitive, unknown little place in a swamp.  yet she grew and developed her intensely compassionate and wise spirituality in that desolate marginalized place.

for so many years, she sang devotional songs at night in the family shrine-room, and still to this day, she walks along the seashore there at night singing her spiritual songs.  the workshop of her spiritual life was the darkness of the night and of the vast and unknowable sea. 

when i visited amritapuri during its early days, i too had the chance to experience the qualities of her home-place, and i am sure that this helped me to evolve in terms of my own relationship with darkness.  but that's much more than i can write here, today.