I cannot seem to finish the posts I am writing. I lose interest with tasks if I do not complete them in one pass through. It is not exactly disinterest which I associate with depression. It is sort of a numbness. Rainy and cloudy days in Tucson, Winter’s arrival, might explain my blah-ness.
Reacting to a life in which I am, almost daily, realizing things I should have asked of someone in my family before there was no one left to ask might explain it.
I am disturbed by police getting off without even a ruffle of a real brush with justice for murdering young boys and men with dark skin. The racism that is everywhere in America along with the relatively recent militarization of police forces combines into a really frightening and alien landscape.
My innermost, Pollyanna, self still believes in the goodness that all humans are born with, no original sin for me, nope, and no matter how lousy things get, and believe me, I know lousy, I have to believe that people are inherently better than they seem to be if we get our information about humanity from the airwaves and digital papers rather than from the individuals that make up humanity.
I know that individuals are good, mostly, and that individuals can have substantial influence and change the course of major processes, sometimes. I also learned many moons ago in school that behaviors rewarded by intermittent reinforcement are the most difficult ones to extinguish. The fact that something does not work all the time does not deter me from trying to make it work.
Somewhere deep down inside, I also know that women can successfully change the negative course of where our world seems to be heading. If my voice can motivate or encourage one person to act to build a better world, shouldn’t I do it? I’m wondering what I can do that will be or promote the most significant and positive change in the world.
I keep thinking that the amazing women I am lucky enough to know could do amazing things if we engaged in a collective effort.
I want to get re-involved with NOW that has sagged a bit here in Tucson with the new chapter’s founder’s ill-health.
I also have thoughts of organizing a month long blogging fest that caters to the intelligent, concerned, old enough to know better woman writer. Not necessarily a write every day blog challenge but a “challenge” with options to engage every day, every weekday, or on weekends.
Or maybe to organize a get together of women to discuss writing, wisdom, and what they feel they as yet have to write at a lovely Tucson resort. NOT a “conference.” More like an intimate brain trust retreat of sage women writers that happens to take place by a pool with drinks. No how to sell your writing for cheap to corporations.
I will plot and scheme my way out of the darkness into a better world. Been doing it all of my life.
Some Thoughts on Death and Mourning
My brother passed away last weekend. Roger left us forever at five minutes after midnight on Sunday November 9th, 2014. I was on my way to the All Soul’s Procession, a wonderful contemporary community sharing of celebration of people’s lives and supportive public sharing of grief when I got the news via text on Sunday night.
Needless to say perhaps, I am thinking a lot about death, death rituals, death culture, and my personal views of death.
Death is the most personal experience there is. Birth is shared, but death meets us alone.
NDE
I should say that I have not been all that concerned about what will happen to me after death since December of 1977. I was in college, my best friend from High School, Kim Marie Sanders, was in a horrific car crash on November 6th, 1977, seven days after her 21st birthday. Her brain stem was crushed. A few weeks later I was at home, a solid but worn, two story house, a rental on Greenbush Avenue in Lafayette, Indiana where I lived in Junior year of college when I had what I have to describe as a classic NDE experience.
As I walked into a bedroom I passed out, I guess. But it was different, quite distinct, from when I usually blacked out which I had some experience with as I had very low blood pressure back then. Normally, when I would pass out I would just have my vision narrow in as in the iris of a camera, as a circle, graying out.
But this time I did not see that, I saw a tunnel of light. As I began to travel in the tunnel or beam of light I felt as though my energy or essence was draining from my body through the back base of my skull. Then there was bright golden white light. At the end of the tunnel I knew there was just LOVE, complete accepting love. I did not see individuals although I felt like there was someone there. I did not consciously get to the end of the tunnel but I remember thinking, “Wow, this was death and it was not bad at all.”
I think I woke up about an hour later. I knew my friend had changed, but I wasn’t in touch with her family until a few weeks later. It was then that I found out that she had come out of the coma she had been in since the wreck on the same afternoon I had the encounter with the light. She was in the coma until mid-December, Friday December 16th I think. She died on Friday, January 13th, 1978.
I had a very difficult time with her death. I grieved for years. But I was not afraid. I have never been able to reconcile this disparity except that I can accept my own death, but not that of another person.
I think it is that I am selfish. I just do not want to be alone without my friends and family.
Something Amiss
I’ve always thought something was amiss with what people told me about death and how they really felt about it. I was three years and two months old when my mother came in to me in the morning, crying and obviously very upset. She said, “Grandma died during the night.” My analytical self was already present within me apparently as I distinctly remember being confused that I had been told that when you die, you will be with Jesus. From everything I had been told as a toddler, this Jesus guy was a really good guy and Heaven, with Jesus, was a good place. So what was up? Grandma was with Jesus. That was a good thing. Why was Mom crying? Incongruity. Someone was not telling the truth.
Selfish Loss
I think what I experience as grief, and thus mourning rituals, is an incredibly selfish indulgence. How does our grief add up to anything but our experience of loss. It really has very little to do with the person who died. It is all about the pain we the living experience. Everything we do, for the dead, is really for ourselves. I think I learned this from my dad. I think I have finally figured out that Dad viewed cemeteries as parks where you talk about the past, teach kinship, consider the impacts of life and living in various ways. This from a man who said that when he died we should just, “toss him over the fence to the hogs.” Historical markers were okay but the obsession with body preservation was over the top in his view.
Shift in Perspective
These are some of the things I’m thinking about today. I couldn’t wait any longer to grieve. I had to take today off to just feel, think, ponder, and cry. Normally I would tell stories of the person recently deceased with others who loved or knew him, but I’m 2000 miles away and the only one left in my generation of close family. My eldest brother Jim is 75 and has memory problems. So I’m having my own private remembrance.
Perhaps I am just being selfish, but I have a lot of information I need to share. I’ve decided that information exchange is the most important ritual. If I have information that might help someone with a question or concern or just to create an understanding, I need to get it out there. I have several years until I am 60, but much information would be lost if I died before I got it into the cultural information collective. These are the things that matter to me. Distilling lives into stories. I have much work to do.
You Knew A Rant Was Coming!
Why are people so stupid? Why do people support actions and people that work against there own interests? They do you know. It is a Horatio Alger thing. Only smart people will get that reference.
Well, I chalk it up (maybe I should say chuck it up) to evolution. Yep. Most people, even really educated ones, do not understand the concept of evolution. Survival of the fittest is a rather misleading shorthand phrase. Fittest does not mean best. Fit only means having reproduced oneself biologically. If you live to pass on your traits you have been successful evolutionarily. You are fit. The fittest means leaving behind the most surviving offspring.
Intelligence is not a fit trait. At least not high intelligence. The more educated someone is the fewer children that person is likely to have. Presuming education equates at some level with intelligence, having fewer children than everyone else is going to mean there are very few intelligent people in the population.
Culture is supposed to evade this fact of life by being the way we pass on information outside of the biological dictates of genetics. Culture allows us pass on knowledge to individuals who share no family connections with us.
Basically, intelligence helps us all, but it doesn’t stop the ignorant from overpopulating the planet by at least one half.
And who am I calling stupid? You really want me to make enemies don’t you?
- Well adherents of the extremist Quiverfull brand of über-patriarchal fundamentalism for one. Actually the males in this cult are exhibiting an often-practiced male animal behavior. It is the social chador American ultra-conservative American Fundamentalism.
- Fox News watchers, secondly. ’nuff said.
- Climate change deniers.
- Namby-Pamby Democrats who try to avoid any strong and or progressive stands.
- Republicans who know they are liars.
If we do not start using the knowledge we have, then well, we deserve the massive multi-system collapse that awaits us within just a few years from economic, environmental, and climatic catastrophes.
Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe is almost certainly the next chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. He is an idiot.
There I ranted. You can stop holding your breath now.
Conversations with a Ghost
Now before you go all logos or pathos on me, I have not been seeing any wraiths or spirits, at least not more than I usually do. Where I live, in Tucson, this month is a lead up to the All Souls Procession. This month, in my life, is a month when I think a lot about those who have left the world of the living, because of the many birthdays I would be celebrating with those people whose absence truly does create a void in my life.
I think my dad is the person in my close family with whom I most miss conversation, discussion, and story-telling. I didn’t really get to have all that many conversations with my dad when I was an adult. He was gone before I had a child and before I realized in mid-life that he and I were very much alike. A perfect impossible day would be spent with him under a split trunk box elder tree looking over the farm fields I knew as a youth . There would be lemonade and angel food cake. History, philosophy, and religion would be discussed in depth. Paradox and inconsistency would be noted. Eyes would twinkle. Family history and folklore would be dissected. Possible revisions would be made. It would be grand.
But, as I cannot live that impossibility, other than in pleasant thoughts, I have been listening to The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright, and The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality by Richard Panek.
So you see, I am not really having conversations with a ghost. I am listening to and having thoughts about books that recreate, for me, the mind space that I’d like to think Dad and I would be sharing if we could talk. A ghost, a shade, a shadow of him is with me as I do this. It is comforting.
With so much of the universe missing, is it any wonder that we little humans try to construct meaning from the voids we note in our lives?
Dreams of Strength and Wisdom
Sometimes things seem to align. Right now the writings of several people I read, the comments on my posts, and just knowing and having met many of these women writers in the last year or so convinces me that there is a wisdom brewing.
Many of us write from monikers real, imagined, or somewhere in between out in cyberspace, that suggest midpoints in midlife, although I think we all know that the midpoint of our lives is apt to be behind us unless we live to be over 100.
I cannot speak for the other women, but I know that for me I have been thinking about the ending of individual lives and how we personally feed into the human legacy. I realize that I might be a bit young to be thinking about what we leave behind, but I guess I tend to be an outlier in most things. As an anthropologist I am intrigued by what we as individuals add to the nebulous collective of knowledge and structures and rules that we call culture. Recently facing the reality of probably losing another brother in the near future brings the theoretical into the world of personal, practical, nitty-gritty reality.
I am 57. I am an elder of the Late Boomer Cohort within the so-called Baby Boom Generation. Sid Vicious and I were born within a week of each other and I have taken on the comparison as a mantle so as to show that Punks obviously delineated something significant breaking away from our older Hippie brothers and sisters. I try to use female examples wherever possible, but I have not found an easily recognized icon of my own gender that fits the bill as well as Sid does. Patti Smith rose up in the rock world at the same time as Sid, but she is one of the oldest of the Boomer Gen. I guess that shows that women of the Boom couldn’t sneak through the cracks into the new cultural paradigm until a critical mass of change burst through the barriers and opened a new ecosystem, or at least a new niche, defined by a new level of open communication and personal determination.
Women began to really come into their own when reliable birth control allowed larger and larger numbers of women to direct the course of their lives more than at any point in human history. The later born boomers are the women who were just becoming sexually active as Roe v. Wade was decided. The 1970s were where the trends of the 1960s became real in the lives of the culture as a whole. The last half of the Boomer Generation are the first women to have had self-determination for all of their adult lives. We are also the first group of women to have a level of comfort with the interconnectivity that the online world brings with it.
This is a shift of seismic proportions that is still playing out as human culture works this development into the mix. Women who are of an age to become a wise woman, an elder, to sit at the grandmothers’ counsel right now have perspective that was impossible to fathom even a generation ago.
The balance of power is shifting. Let us continue to work toward wisdom, as the women elders we are developing into have more important work in preservation of the world and humanity, as part of that living system, than any generation has faced. We are up to the task. We are finding our way, making our way.
Life to Action
Last week I wrote about several topics that touched or connected with my personal life: anthropology/archaeology, 20th century culture change, and women’s economic practices.
If I were given to superstitious behavior I would say that I have been given the amazing, sometimes difficult, but always informational rich, experiences I have had in life so that I can discuss the interrelationships between experience , awareness, and action. I’m not given to superstitious behavior, but I also understand that some people, like me, need to search for meaning in life because we just do not accept the embedded meaning of ritual and cultural beliefs that is given to us as truth. Without finding personal meaning in the life-given events some of us would be reduced to nihilist despair.
We create our own meaning as a friend wrote about this past week, but that said, most of us out of the necessity of observing time flow in one direction use the shorthand that culture provides to us. That shorthand has gotten quite complex as we moved in one lifetime from the culture limited by the personal distance we could walk in day or village distance we could ride via ground travel in a day to global communication in a day to global travel in a day.
The informational implications of these changes are vast. When I studied anthropology I learned that it takes 6 generations to create a mythical being. This means that you have to have no one living who can say, “Now just hold your horses, Jenny Girl, I met my grandmother’s grandmother and she was no dern goddess.” For example, My Grandmother, Edith Pearl Palmer, was born on Nov 1883 in Indiana. Her grandmother, I am reasonably certain , was Lydia Daniel Brubaker.
Lydia was probably the Lydia Daniel born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on June 1, 1814 to J George Daniel and Saloma Sietz. Lydia did marry Jacob Brubaker and had 10 children. She passed away on 13 Aug 1867 in Collamer, Whitley County, Indiana, USA.
but I have not seen the actual, physical records of her birth, marriage and death and my mother did not report seeing these records either, although Mom, Fay, remembered her grandmother, Amanda, talking about her mother, Lydia, dying when she, Amanda, was still a girl in Whitley County, Indiana. I grew up in Whitley County, Indiana.
Like nearly all the European derived families who populated Indiana in the first half of the 19th Century they traveled through Ohio. The information from this chart derived from the Conner Prairie site that in turn drew upon the print source of: M.J. Rohrbough, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier, p.63.
1800 1810 1820 1830 1840 Ohio 45,000 239,581 581,434 938,903 1.4 mil. Indiana 5,000 24,520 147,178 343,600 600,000
It does not take all that long to create totally bogus people, life stories, and broader mythic narratives. My grandmother’s grandmother was born in 1814. That is 200 years ago. That is 6 generations in 200 years.
Okay, I admit the six generations concept of mythic creation is blown to bits by rapidly reproducing people such as the 6 generations of living women in one family depicted in this 2012 article or in this one with 6 generations of family in this 2013 one (both with images!) I found this reference to another 6 generation moment in 1965. But do remember that the age of antibiotics and advanced medical technology probably contributed to this truly rare and mind-boggling generational overlap.
All this is to put the question “How do you know what you know?” into a female frame of reference.
Why? Because I believe that one of the primary reasons the world is in such a sorry state is that women’s voices, sensibilities, and wisdom has been suppressed, ignored, and ridiculed by men in power. I don’t know how many generations it takes to extinguish a god, but a new one can be created in 200 years or less. And with the entire world in the informational reach of a day’s travel, the information we have to choose from is exponentially greater than that to which our grandmother’s had access.
There have been recent concerts, marches, programs, and international diplomatic gatherings concerned with climate, poverty, and making the world a better place. There is an expanding fundamentalist war within Islam. New plagues are possibly taking hold. And we are realizing that our entertainment is as destructive as gladiatorial games. Everything is in play. With things in flux, we can change things.
I think it is time for serious reevaluation of priorities and re-institutionalize women’s perspectives, values, and ways of knowing into the culture at large. Of course we need women represented at the highest levels of government and business, but more than that we need to simply change things by what we think, write, teach, allow ourselves to say and do. We have to mean and do differently. We can make everything different and better for our granddaughters’ granddaughters.