Connections (again)

Connections made throughout my life are amazing to me - and often fill me with wonder.

For instance, tomorrow (May 31) a woman who was my Camp Counselor in 1970 - 1972 will be running a marathon in San Diego, CA. She is doing so to raise money for curing Leukemia.

Her 10th mile will be dedicated to Jesse. Isonomist's dear son.

So from New York, through Florida, through Arizona (where Nancy lives) to California the memory of a beloved child, and human beings trying to find a cure to a devastating disease will be united for those minutes of her mile.... and of course, beyond that too.

It happens all over and all the time. It's not just me. I know that.

But I'm awed by it just the same.

So Nancy: good luck!! I'll be thinking of you and praying for you and wishing you a terrific run.

And Iso: I'll be thinking of you and Jesse with much love all day as well.

Connections.

Critters

Tonight we're in North Dakota. Having spent three days in and around Keystone, South Dakota - enjoying Mount Rushmore and other great sites. The Badlands are amazing...as are the Black Hills.


I have never seen a buffalo up close before. Not one that was still alive. This was taken in Custer State Park, and these guys were kind of swarming around the car. Very cool - a little unnerving.

We're listening to John Marshall's "The Journey of Crazy Horse" and so I'm learning a lot about how important the buffalo were to the Lakota.

So seeing them up close and personal, while listening to this amazing man read his people's story is really an experience!

There are other critters running all over the place out here. White tailed deer (which look an awful lot like their cousins in Florida) and the Prong Horn which we kind of call antelope, although I'm not so sure they are. We have a corny habit

of singing "Give me a home..."
And we can't tell if it's "where the deer and the antelope lay..
or play..." We've seen them lying around but not playing. But, maybe they do when we're not looking.

And these guys - well, I'm sure they're a nuisance and annoying but they're really cute. They pop up out of their dens when we drive by as if they want to say hello.

And they cheep and chirp and holler and play. The adults just stand there and watch us - these are three Prairie Dog Pups that were scampering all over the place - I think they were posing for me, because they waited until I got my camera all focused and everything.

They were probably also wanting food. We do NOT feed the wildlife.
And, I have seen birds, birds, birds!! I can't get pictures of birds... I suck and so does my camera. But I've seen (new to me): Western Meadowlarks, Lark Buntings, Mountain Bluebirds, Yellow-headed Blackbirds, Wood Ducks and many others (my notes and books are in the car) and I just can't stop watching for them!! It's very exciting.

I'm glad I'm not driving - could be even MORE exciting.

Tomorrow we turn west again and head into Montana. We're going to stop at Medicine Lake Preserve ... I hope I can get to sleep tonight!

Pipestone

Today is the 8th day of my trip. We've driven over 2,000 miles and are now in South Dakota. Pretty far away for a native Floridian!!

Today I met an artist. His name is Travis and he is a Native American pipe carver in Pipestone, MN.

He quarries the dark, red pipestone by hand out of ancient quarries that have been providing this sacred stone to many Plains tribes for thousands of years. (Yes - thousands!) This was the site of an ancient sea, and the clay and sand compressed and created this beautiful, smooth stone.

He took a break from carving a beautiful bear-shaped pipe and spoke of how the veins of pipestone slope downward toward the east and cover hundreds of miles. He has worked a particular quarry now so that he is 17 feet down and hitting high quality pipestone. He can only dig during the fall .... because the snows in the winter and the water in the spring and the heat and humidity of the summer it is impossible except in the few months of autumn. Every bit is done by hand... the digging, the picking and the removal of the quartz which lies on top. It is an amazing project.

And he then brings his pipestone, finishes it into blocks and spends much of his time carving the beautiful pipes. These are just the ends of pipes, where the sumac or tobacco is placed in the bowl. Pipe stems are made from various hardwood and larger sumac trees.

These pipes are beautiful works of art and still sacred to the Lakota, Sisseton and Wahpeton as well as other nations of Native Americans.

His pride in his people was evident, and his skill and talent are amazing. He also spoke of helping out some cousins who also quarry ... and how they are fewer and fewer who are willing to do the work. There are beautiful examples of his work in the links.

What a wonderful experience for me.

The Preface

My long road trip had a bit of a preface. As my husband flew to NYC to complete some business (and make some money) I drove north ... through Cullman, AL and up to Bardstown, KY. My plan was to spend some time at St. Bernard's Abbey and then at Gethsemani Abbey. Both were delightful and made the trip seem restful and peacefully paced. Even though I was driving on some interstates.

Between Cullman and Bardstown I stopped at Mammoth Cave National Park. What a quaint stop, and a trip back in time as well as an astounding geological site. If you're ever anywhere near here, and enjoy stalagmites and stalactites then pull off and go!

Bardstown is interesting for a couple of things: (1) Its basically the bourbon capital of the world, so if you like bourbon - this one's for you! (2) It seems to be one of the major Catholic enclaves in the midwest and (3) Stephen Collins Foster had his home here and there is a lovely state park bearing the name "My Old Kentucky Home State Park." There is the home which is a lovely museum and beautiful grounds and a carillon playing 'Beautiful Dreamer' and other Foster tunes throughout the day.

I found Kentucky to be simply beautiful and very friendly. Traveling by myself I always get kind of skittish about where I stop and where I eat ... but here I felt totally fine walking around the small towns and stopping for gas or a bite to eat.

I stayed the "Beautiful Dreamer" B&B which was lovely ... but I think after two nights I was ready to move on. If, however, I wanted a kind of perfect town to raise my kids I might consider something like Bardstown. It has a very nice feel to it.

Then I drove into Louisville to pick up my hubby who flew in from NY and we set off. The Vacation officially began.

We meandered through Owensboro and visited his Professor at Brescia University (he's working on becoming a Deacon) and then we made for St. Louis. Had a lovely dinner in the Lafayette Square area and now are headed for Iowa.

We've slowed the pace down considerably and look forward to a long, lovely ramble through the midwest.

If you stayed awake long enough to read this - then I salute you!

Shuffling the Deck

Never let it be said that my life settles in and sits for a long time doing nothing. However much I may like that in theory, there is no experience of it. At all.

This week I'm planning a workshop for Saturday, and having two presenters in from out of town. They will be staying one night with me, and then the workshop is on Saturday morning. I'm looking forward to it very much - the planning has been simple and straightforward and it look slike we have an enthusiastic 30-50 participants. So that's great!

This week I'm also beginning a Writer's Group. Very small at this point, but we're moving ahead and so the writing will take on a bit more discipline. Thank god. It always sounds so trudging and boring to apply discipline to the creative process but it is never either of those. In fact, when I do apply a disciplined approach my whole creative process gets quite invigorated - so what's the resistance? Who knows. I'm just grateful to have a writer friend willing to start a group and begin the journey with me.

This week I'm also preparing, packing, organizing and planning to leave on Monday for a six week drive-about! We had to change our plans from a July/August trip to a May/June trip and that's been 'exciting' to see just how quickly we could make all the necessary changes and arrangements. I'm feeling very in-the-flow because most of it has worked out beautifully!

So off we toodle - up through Alabama into Kentucky and Indiana, turning left around Chicago and heading into Minneapolis then a serious meander through North and South Dakota and Montana and ending up in Wyoming at the Grand Teton National Park. I have no other set points...and even these are subject to change.

The call of the open road is a new thing for my husband...and so we pack a few things, mostly books and music, and head off with a hazy idea of where we want to go and read local papers and blogs as we move into an area to see what is going on at the time. We have a few family members to visit and we have laptops and phones if necessary. Mostly we read, walk, drive, putter and see what there is to see.

So this week, which is just halfway born today is full of good stuff. Shuffling the deck of my plans and existence to include some pretty good stuff. I'm not as opposed to "change" as I once was and I do find it fascinating that we can operate with some degree of spontaneity!

More blogs to come!

Giving

There is a notion that if you do something for 29 days it becomes a habit. Last year about this time I joined a group called 29-Day Gifts.

For three rounds I was very diligent and conscious about giving. It was, in fact, life altering and I was thrilled with the whole process. Very thankful for the technology that enabled so many to do so much.

Then, as so often happens, I hit a wall. I didn't immediately become selfish or stingy. But I hit a wall, and saw nothing but obstacles. When I went to the site there was "too many....too much... too whatever" and when I made plans to give it was "too this or too that"....and I found myself winding down in ennui.

"go, go, go said the bird: human kind cannot bear very much reality" ....so said TS Eliot. And truer words I cannot imagine.

No matter who deeply I may desire to be a giver, to be consistent, to be present and to be aware... I, so definitely part of human kind, cannot bear "very much" reality and so I end up sinking ..... " words strain, crack and sometimes break under the burden, under the tension, slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, will not stay still." (More Eliot).

And so I begin another round of giving, conscious again, and hopeful. One small thing each day.

Bearing as much reality as I can.

Some Thoughts on the Torture Debate

This is from Jung's Psychological Types:

The relation of the individual to his fantasy is very largely conditioned by his relation to the unconscious in general, and this in turn is conditioned in particular by the spirit of the age.

American's have a rather large fantasy that they "know" what is going on, that they "understand" how their government works, that it is "of the people" which to them (to us) means that nothing that is beyond my understanding is "of the government."

Our Representatives at the highest levels (ie Presidents, successful Chiefs of Staff, etc) know this. And they seem to capitalize on it. Perhaps that is how politics is supposed to work - Real Polotik has, after all, been around a while.

According to the degree of rationalism that prevails, the individual will be more disposed or less to have dealings with the unconscious and its products. Christianity, like every closed system of religion, has an undoubted tendency to suppress the unconscious in the individual as much as possible, thus paralyzing his fantasy activity. Instead, religion offers stereotyped symbolic concepts that are meant to take the place of his unconscious once and for all. The symbolic concepts of all religions are recreations of unconscious processes in a typical, universally binding form.

To loosely use this as a model, we can substitute Americanism for Christianity. Surely during the last 29 years Americanism has had a tendency to suppress the unconscious of the individual and insert stereotyped symbolic concepts ... much easier to chew than actual facts and one's own need to grow up. Brings to mind TS Eliot "humans cannot bear very much reality."

Religious teaching supplies, as it were, the final information about the "last things" and the world beyond human consciousness.

Again, substitute Americanism for Religious and you have us here now contemplating "what to do about the torture?" Because surely our subscription to Americanism tells us that the final word lies with the individual.

Wherever we can observe a religion being born, we see how the doctrinal figures flow into the founder himself as revelations, in other words as concretizations of his unconscious fantasy. The forms welling up from his unconscious are declared to be universally valid and thus replace the individual fantasies of others.

Well, let's look at Reagan. And Cheney. Reagan certainly recreated his own "Evil Empire" and formulated diplomacy based on how he viewed the world - good vs evil, us vs. them. We still eat this shit up. Cheney, Rove, etc used the laws of the land and the processes of Washington to simply build, brick by brick, a pathway to the place we are now. A yellow brick road, as it were.

The evangelist Matthew has preserved for us a fragment of this process from the life of Christ: in the story of the temptation we see how the idea of kingship rises out of the founder's unconscious in the visionary form of the devil, who offers him power over all the kingdoms of the earth. Had Christ misunderstood the fantasy and taken it concretely, there would have been one madman the more in the world. But he rejected the concretism of his fantasy and entered the world as a king to whom the kingdoms of heaven are subject. He was therefore no paranoiac, as the result also proved.

It can be said that Reagan and certainly George W. Bush did, in fact, "misunderstand" their own fantasies and took them absolutely concretely. Bush particularly saw himself as equivalent with the "King of the World" and that he was actually called by God to be so. Stifling the unconscious and viewing the world as concrete is what has got us here.

Cheney, utilitarian that he is, never succumbed to the broad-based kingship fantasies. Instead he worked tirelessly to pass laws, file briefs, adjust wording and formulate agency rulings that would simply make the actions legal. Before the actions took place. And he legally and publicly did this. Out in the open. In front of the masses and masses of American people.

And now we want to bitch? To jump up and down? To declare foul?

Right.

It's almost like a textbook case of an adolescent who was so busy texting and emailing that they just didn't notice that Dad sold the car, sold the house, got a job in another state and packed the van. It's over. It's done. We're moving on.

This is what is so frustrating about having the dialogue. We forget this part. If we actually ever knew it.

I guess what I'm saying is that yes, we have to hold leaders accountable. We certainly do. But at the same time, we must hold ourselves responsible as well. Responsible for paying attention, for knowing how the system works and for understanding how things "go down" long before it is force-fed to us by the media.

The fact that most of what Cheney and Bush did was done in broad daylight, passed through Congress and with the intention of sweeping away protections will more than likely protect them from criminal accountability. What about us?