Ancestors

May 27, 2015December 18, 2019

Anointing Ancestral Land

This was the first time I’d felt called to go on a spiritual pilgrimage. I needed to meet God on the land of my ancestors, trusting that this would help me step outside of my collapse with shame over the fact that they’d owned slaves.

Within the week, I’d confirmed that my friend Alease Bess, whose ancestors had been slaves in North Carolina, was excited joining me on this journey.

I wanted to take something we could offer to the land. My friend and earthmother, Candice Covington, recommended I take rosemary, cajeput and black pepper essential oils for anointing the soil.

“Oil from evergreen cajeput trees,” she explained, “purifies and purges old rot and decay of emotion, pain, loss and fear and creates a fertile place to plant new seeds. As you step onto your ancestral land, you need some of this heavy-duty purification of the old. Rosemary will help strengthen and center you with its healing of memories, and black pepper will strengthen and fortify your cleansing.”

Knowing that I wanted all of the spiritual and energetic support I could muster for this pilgrimage, I packed pocket-sized bottles of each of these oils, trusting I would know when and how to use them.

I gathered maps of North Carolina. I wrote down the few details I knew about the location of the home of the original Tipps immigrant, Lorenz, in Salisbury, and the Dogwood Plantation of his son Jacob near Morganton. Union General Sherman had torched the courthouses that had held the titles to the land, so I had to rely on the description of the general location Mom had found during her genealogical research.

A few weeks later, Alease and I headed west from her home in Durham toward Salisbury. First, we were looking for the homestead of immigrant Lorenz Tipps, Jacob’s father. Lack of exact locations on the map demanded a different sort of navigation, so we listened to the breezes and trusted that the Spirit would guide us.

Driving up and down country roads, Alease and I explored the area described in Mom’s account of Lorenz’s homesteading documents as “on Hagan Fork off Lyle Creek, tributary of the Catawba River.” In that general vicinity, something faint but clear in both Alease’s and my spirits indicated it was time to pull over, park the car and step out onto the land.

A few fences marked off the field, but no homes lined this stretch of the road. Wandering in silence, we honored the beauty of the land and vastness of the sky. This had been Cherokee land for thousands of years. A few hundred years ago, white settlers named it Rowan County, then Lincoln County and now Catawba County. Political lines drawn in the dirt may have changed, yet the land remained whole.

Alease and I brought what felt to me like meager gifts to atone for such a horrifying history—a few oils and prayer. I picked up a stick and scraped a cross in the hard, dry soil. Opening up the small bottles, I poured fragrant essential oils of tree, herb and flowering vine back into the earth. Their spicy scents rose like incense.

Over the anointed dirt, Alease and I extended our hands in blessing—hers pecan tan and mine a peachy tan. She sang of blood. I spoke of water.

Alease prayed, “Blood has saturated this land. History tried to shove these bloodstains under the grass. We know they are still here.”

She leaned her head back and began to sing, “Nothing can for sin atone; nothing but the blood of Jesus.”

As the last notes of the hymn faded away, she was silent for a few minutes. “Today a new blood is offered, poured freely into this blood-soaked land. This is birthing blood, cleansing blood flowing from Immanuel’s veins.”

I added my prayer: “Come living waters, come to this country soaked with generations of tears. Wash the land and satisfy our deepest thirst.”

When the anointing was complete and a rock left to mark the spot, we returned to the car and drove away. The reality of both of our ancestors’ experiences remained unchanged, yet we felt lighter.

We stopped in town to break bread together and share stories sparked by the morning. Then, we headed west to track down the land that once was Jacob and Margaret Tipps’s Dogwood Plantation.

After the Revolutionary War, Lorenz’s son Jacob moved westward a few miles to Burke and Caldwell Counties to make his fortune. He staked his claim, worked the land and received the title to six hundred and forty acres. Jacob and Margaret had fourteen children and “owned” thirteen African slaves.

“Near the Morganton-Lenoir airport” was as much as we knew. Alease and I drove up and down the roads near the airport. Old Amherst Road wound its way to a new subdivision. We turned around and drove halfway back down the road. Once again, we both agreed when it felt like we had arrived at the right place, and we stopped the car.

Stepping out, we walked through a break in the trees onto to the edge of a pasture. Ancient mountains had eons ago eroded into the blue hills that lined the far side of the field, while Jacob’s plantation home and slave shacks had long since disintegrated.

Sitting on the ground, I picked up a rock. Once again I scored the hard earth and poured out the anointing oils while Alease and I prayed.

As our prayers grew silent, I stood and walked over to lean on a white pine that might have shaded my family members when they lived here. Through her prickly bark, a warm tingling soothed my back, just behind my heart allowing my shame and anger at Jacob to lessen. The sins of racism and slave-owning remained, but compassion flowed freely in me and out into the tree.

Gazing at the Smoky Mountains, Alease stood at my side praying softly. A white pick-up truck whizzing down the road startled me. Through the dust I saw a white-skinned man at the wheel, gun on a rack behind his head. When he caught sight of us, he did a double take. I assumed he wondered what we were up to.

Actually, it wasn’t a bad question. What in the world were we up to?

We were there on a sacred pilgrimage, not to our spiritual holy land in Israel but to our ancestral land. Standing together, Alease and I felt the hallowed ground under our feet and prayed that healing would move forward and back through the generations.

The next day we headed for our respective homes. Through this shared pilgrimage, I had been given a way to honor my ancestors without forgetting that they also owned slaves. The land and our prayers wove the stories of Alease’s and my families, their joys and woes, into a single fabric.

Excerpted with a few adjustments for this shortened format from Big Topics At Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself, my book published by Rosegate Press in 20012, pages 274-286.

March 8, 2015December 18, 2019

Deep Diving

I come alive when diving right into the middle of topics my father told me to avoid—money, race, religion, gender and politics.

Not interested in locking horns or intellectual analysis, I want partners who seek root-level transformation—from personal to global. I am captivated by sharing and listening to a wide variety of personal stories and experiences within diverse groups as these conversations can shift assumptions and misinformation—the things that keep us separated—in order for us to move forward equitably, together.

Since I was a girl, I’ve turned to the written word as my favorite way to explore both the edges of life and my own experiences. During the seven years I wrote and rewrote Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself I simultaneously honed my writing skills and dove into my own stories of sleep and waking up. It was a magical process.

I revel in the dance of writing and deep diving. The best way for me to begin a writing day is to wake before the sun rises with a brilliant first sentence, followed by a flood of ideas for a new writing. While noticing all that I hadn’t noticed growing up isn’t always fun, I savor the sight of expanded vistas that emerge as I begin to see my life as one part of a multigenerational, global human family in the midst of our diverse, earthly home. And then return to my desk to write about what I see.

In addition to writing and poking into the nooks and corners of my life, I also delight in hosting “big conversations” where groups of people share longings and experiences of living in ways that bring our faith and values right into the middle of our deeply divided world. One particularly juicy topic I enjoy exploring is how money flows in our lives, in the community and in the world and how to continue to bring our engagement with that financial flow into deeper alignment with our values.

Waking up to the paradoxes within and in the world around me is sometimes uncomfortable and often requires me to change my behavior. Yet this is the holy work of spiritual transformation, both personally and in our world. It is pure grace to bring my deep diving faith-in-action to this moment in history.

This is what makes me feel alive from my head to my toes. What makes you tingle with excitement for yourself and the world?

September 16, 2014

Let Your Heart Break #4: Living While Dying

Ed and Paul, June 2001 — Ed and Paul, 2001

What can Dad’s walk toward death teach us about living?

Thirteen years ago, as Dad lay dying, I watched the otters play in Monterey Bay and monarch butterflies fly around the bushes just outside his living room window.

Leaving my brother and the Hospice workers with Dad, I walked along the shore to the neighborhood coffee shop in the early morning hours of Monday, October 1, 2001. While waiting for my latte, I noticed a brochure for Reiki treatments by Wendy Cohen. I’d undergone this Japanese treatment before when a practitioner laid her hands over my body and filled me with renewed life force. I had found it more energetically powerful than a massage, and it felt like intercessory prayer. I wanted a Reiki session for Dad to ease his death process and for me as I supported his journey to and following death.

I immediately called Wendy. She was busy that morning but promised to check back in a few hours.

Wendy called mid-afternoon to say she was coming. By that time Dad was actively dying.

“Do you want me to come anyway?” she asked.

I did.

A few minutes later, in walked a stranger dressed in a mini skirt and Harley Davidson jacket, holding a bright red basket filled with little bottles of flower vibrational essences. Wendy silently took her place among the small group that circled Dad’s bed.

As soon as Wendy’s hands hovered over Dad’s feet, my hands touching his face felt his energy soften. His breathing slowed, and my heart melted. Two minutes later, his spirit gently slipped out of his body. His final letting go.

When family gathered for Dad’s funeral a week later, his casket lay in St. Mary’s by the Sea Episcopal Church, a church he’d attended only for funerals and weddings. Draped over his coffin was a cloth of bright red, orange and green—the tablecloth Mom had completed for our Christmas, days before she died.

I touched his coffin on my way to the pulpit to preach his funeral sermon.

As ended my sermon, I said, “Dad died in the living room of his home, where Mom died fifteen years ago. This tired old body he left behind is here in the same church

where Mom’s funeral was held and is now covered by the same cloth that covered her casket. And our family will again use the tablecloth to cover the family table when we gather to feast together knowing that we are encircled with the spirit of Ed and Sue. … God, ‘give to us now your grace, that as we shrink before the mystery of death, we may see the light of eternity.’ ” *

On September 11, 2001, Dad began his three-week walk toward death. Simultaneously, hijacked planes crashed into buildings that epitomized US economic, military and governmental power.

For a moment Americans came together in grief, but within days we shifted to talk of war and patriotic pride. As a result, thousands more have died in our unwinnable battles. In contrast, Dad responded with an open heart and lived even as he died.

Though Dad was an in-control man for most of his life, his heart had softened fifteen years earlier after Mom died. We’d grieved together, cried together and talked about her often. But my heart broke open even more as I watched Dad let go into his death. He taught me many things about life while dying.

Look around, even when things are falling apart. Butterflies and otters, flowers and clouds remind us that there is a bigger picture that surrounds the crisis at hand. Connecting with nature can keep us grounded.

Expect help to come from all directions. Sometimes it comes from predictable sources: family or hospice workers. Yet sometimes it arrives in a miniskirt and leather jacket, bearing a red basket of love. We never know. But before help will be given, you must be open to the unexpected and say, “Yes, please come.”

Gather together. The table of Life is spread and covered with a beautiful cloth. Sometimes that cloth covers a casket and it is time to grieve, cry, and remember. Let your heart break. If we don’t stop and give space to our hurting hearts, we can’t fully be present to joy and celebration either. For holidays such as Thanksgiving or Christmas, this bright cloth covers our feast laden dining table. Last month, our celebration was the wedding of my son Paul to Lauren and, thus, the cloth adorned the table joining our two families. When time is held for both grieving and celebrating, gifts are offered abundantly.

Whether we are faced with exploding planes or a terminal illness, how we respond matters. We are not alone. There are more possibilities than we can imagine. If we’ll keep walking with open hearts, dancing or crying or shouting in the midst of it all—anything except running away or knee-jerk reacting—we just might discover that Life is offered abundantly far richer than we can ask or imagine.

* Excerpted from my book, Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself, pg 143-145. Final words are from ”A Service of Death and Resurrection,” in The United Methodist Hymnal (Tennessee: The United Methodist Publishing House, 1969), 871

Fourth in the series about living while dying.

August 9, 2014

Let Your Heart Break #2: Death is Part of Life

Dad was an organized man who kept meticulous books recording every penny earned and every penny spent. For as long as I could remember, he had exercised right on schedule, played golf on schedule and focused on his bowel regularity. Until he began his walk toward death, letting go wasn’t Dad’s cup of tea.

Somewhere in his bones, this man who had never been overtly interested in matters of the spirit knew that these final weeks of his life were a sacred invitation of transformation through release. He let go gracefully, if methodically.

When we met his attorney, Dad released his legal responsibilities. He made sure I understood his bookkeeping, then handed over all financial tasks. He walked independently for another week before he surrendered to a rolling walker.

One afternoon, Dad made yet another trek down the long hallway to the bathroom with his rolling walker. He stopped at his bed to take off his Pendleton wool shirt because its length got in the way. I offered to shorten the hem. He refused, insisting that there was no need for me to do that, and continued on his own.

Thursday, Connie came to clean his house, as she had done weekly for the fifteen years since Mom had died. When he told her about his cancer, Connie replied that maybe he would get better.

“No, I am dying,” he corrected Connie. “I’ve had a good, long life and I am ready to die.”

On Friday, Dad stopped walking altogether. We sat together in his bed, as his thoughts vacillated between this world and the next. “I can’t think of any brilliant thoughts to say, though it seems like I should,” he said. “I am quotable.”

All week I’d also felt that I should have been grabbing every opportunity to share profound thoughts about my love of Dad. Instead, we both were learning the richness of shared silence filled with love.

“No one prepares you for dying. Is this the way you thought it would be?” Dad asked me.

He wasn’t expecting an answer, but I was fascinated by his question.

Dad interrupted my pondering, saying, “I want to live a natural death.” He mumbled something else then chuckled, “I didn’t understand that one myself.”

I smiled. So many of our conversations over the years had been practical. Here, with death lurking at the door, we felt free to let our thoughts bounce from the absurd to the profound. All thoughts felt welcome that afternoon as we sat propped up on the bed, side-by-side.

“What if butterflies are the good guys?” he wondered.

I leaned over and kissed his cheek.

Dad was letting go of his life on this Earth. We will all face death one day but today we are facing a different sort of dying: releasing old, outdated ways of living on this planet.

Surrender may not have been my cup of tea so far, but now is a good time for me to practice. Dad’s actions illuminated several skills that help in times of profound change.

Start with an honest assessment of the situation. As Dad responded to unfounded reassurance with, “No, I am dying,” I, too, need to be clear that now is the time to relinquish my tight hold on the status quo. Many of the ways of being that have felt “normal” and “right” must be acknowledged as polluting our world and spirits for us today and for generations to come.

For Dad, death wasn’t an escape; instead, he let go of his “good, long life” with gratitude. Likewise, much of the old has brought me delight and needs to be honored as nurturing my life. However, my culture’s short-sighted, unsustainable and inequitable framework needs to die and be rebuilt.

We speak of violent crime and build more prisons even though violent crime is at a 50 year low. We embrace more and more standard medical tests and treatment (if we can afford it), but overlook the toxic chemicals, radiation and stress that erode human and environmental health. We overlook the implications of privitatization of our water, manipulation of our food supply and destruction of our natural resources while racing through our days at an exhausting speed.

When I am willing to stop walking in the old ways, I can pick up my training wheels for walking into the new.

Dad, pushing his rolling walker, showed another way. He let go of fear in the face of death, and hope was born. He had no idea of what was next, how the process should be or even if butterflies were the good guys. None of that mattered anymore.

After Dad returned to his chair from the bathroom trip where I’d offered to hem his shirt, he reflected, “You know, something interesting just happened. You wanted to do something to make things easier for me, and I wanted to do something to make things easier for you.”

Death is part of life. Transitions aren’t easy, but fighting the inevitable is exhausting. Dad taught me that when I surrender my fear of the unknown, reach out in partnership with others and make daily choices that nurture my global family, I’ll find joy even in the dying parts of my life’s journey.

This is the second in a series about Living while Dying on our way to something new. I offer this in honor of my father, Edward Victor Mathys (1921-2001) and the dying that all of us alive on this planet need to experience now.

Much of this blog was excerpted from my book Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself, pages 140-145.

Photograph by Brenda Wills.

July 22, 2014

Let Your Heart Break #1: The Diagnosis

On the morning of September 11, 2001, the doctor called with the results of my father’s CAT scan: extensive cancer throughout both lungs.

As I hung up the phone, the drone of the television in the living room reported moment-by-moment news, some true and some outlandish guesses, about two planes that had crashed into New York City’s Twin Towers. It was only 9:00 a.m. on the West Coast.

I looked out the window at Monterey Bay. The waves broke and gulls shrieked as they flew overhead. Everything looked normal.

I asked Dad to turn off the television and told him the news. “The doctor just called to say that you have widespread cancer in both lungs.”

“Oh,” Dad replied.

In the context of burning buildings and staggering losses, what were we to do with news of a personal tragedy? Dad turned the television back on. I walked out of the room.

Later, when the TV was turned off and the news had sunk in, Dad talked about his willingness to have chemotherapy. “I’m not afraid to lose my hair,” he said, running his fingers through the few hairs remaining on his balding head.

A few days later I returned home to take my first-born son to college. When he’d graduated from High School a few months before, Dad was delighted and looked healthy. Now he was dying.

Six hundred and thirty miles away from the University, a man who thrived in solitude pondered much in his heart. When I returned to see him the following week, Dad told me in a strong and steady voice, “I don’t want any treatment for this cancer. I’ve led a full life, and I am ready to die.”

I was grateful that he’d decided not to pursue treatment but was startled to hear him speak so directly of his death.

As soon as I could be alone, I reached out to a friend, seeking comfort for my grieving heart. She listened to the full range of my emotions, then said, “Just remember, death is safe.”

Side-by-side with my sadness, I knew that she was right. Settling into the reality of Dad’s illness without fighting it, I became able to accompany him moment by moment.

Fourteen years later, I am haunted by the diagnosis I hear from many sources: civilization as I have known it has tumors in its lungs too. It is dying.

The day the towers fell and my dad began his walk toward death, there was a window of time where my nation could have made a choice to grieve, to come together to look inside at the shadows that have long been present within the twin towers of money and military power. Unfortunately, we made a different choice—violence and retaliation.

Today, as we try to extricate ourselves from those wars we entered on a lie, Iraq is in crisis. Far too many on all sides have died. Far too much money was diverted away from programs that serve life toward war. Again. And again. And again.

Pollution. Climate change. Wealth inequities. Fear. Fracking. Greed. Violence. These are growing out of control. The facts are easily accessible to anyone interested in looking at our culture’s horrifying CAT scan.

If we choose to cling to life as we have known it, to demand cultural chemotherapy even though it won’t do any good, it will be hard to move forward. Desperate attempts to treat the societal tumors in an attempt to get back to normal won’t bring the healing we need to thrive for today or generations to come. That which is diseased needs to die so that something new can be born.

Looks can be deceiving. Dad looked healthy at the graduation in June, but his cancer was growing inside. Likewise, appearances of economic recovery can hide the fact that the cancer of ever-expanding growth continues to spread. Hanging on to the old life and refusing to grieve the losses makes it hard to see, or tend to, the tender new sprouts that are already emerging in unexpected places.

Dad, a precise man who liked to be in control, made a different choice when he could see his life fading away. Walking with him in the last three weeks of his life, he taught me many lessons about how to find life right in the middle of death.

Death is safe. Life is safe. Clinging will kill a person or a culture. It is our choice.

This is the first in a series about Living while Dying on our way to something new. I offer this in honor of my father, Edward Victor Mathys (1921-2001), during his birthday month.

Much of this blog was excerpted from my book Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself, pages 140-145.

Photograph by Judy Bork.

March 24, 2014

Grief on the Way to Transformation: My Cell Phone and Violence #2

Why concern myself with human rights abuses in far away places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Why make connections between myself and the behavior of a long-ago king, the Belgium’s colonial policies or missionaries’ behavior when, although I personally am outraged by their behaviors, none of these people were my family members?

Why think too much about the fact that materials for my cell phone and wedding ring may have involved injustice and ill treatment of others half way around the globe? For me, my cell keeps me connected to people I care about and my wedding ring is a symbol of a life-long love.

I have no interest in collapsing in shame and despair. That is a dead-end street that feels lousy and helps no one.

Yet, I am no longer willing to keep global horrors at arms length, grateful that since I don’t approve I can wash my hands of any connection to things done by other humans, national and transnational corporations who produce the goods I buy, or “my people” (which includes people who share my Euro-American roots, white skin, Christianity or wealth).

Distancing myself from other’s behavior makes it too easy for me to forget the deep historical roots of today’s world events and the fact that I enjoy the benefits of things grown and produced under horrifying conditions.

Maintaining that distance requires that I go back to sleep. That isn’t an option for me anymore.

However I can’t, nor should I, shoulder the responsibility for all of these actions. Nevertheless, I can stop and grieve. Weep for violence and injustice—for both victims and perpetrators. Let my heart break open for those who suffered and continue to suffer far outside my neighborhood.

My personal grief and the world’s grief meet in my heart. That is where I experience the truth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”1

No defensiveness is needed. Only seeing. Grieving. Not getting stuck there, but also not bypassing my need to wail about tragic aspects of human behavior.

Fear is fanned on every street corner and news show. Despair for the enormity of the environmental destruction and human inequity feels like it could easily undermine our capacity to cope with daily life.

The only path I know of that moves toward transformation, runs right through the middle of grief. “To let ourselves feel anguish and disorientation as we open our awareness to global suffering is part of our spiritual ripening. … Out of darkness, the new is born.”2

Against all logic, this path leads me to joy and gratitude. Standing solidly in the center of both grief and joy, I find clarity about my place in the global world. I am prompted to continue to ask myself, “What’s next? What is my next step to further align my behavior with my values?” Not from a place of despair, shame or over-responsibility but from a solid knowing of the interconnectedness of us all.

Paradox again. I always return here. The more I can learn to hold grief and joy, the greater my capacity to live life fully in ways that serve us all.

1. Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from a Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
2. Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown. Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World (British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 1998) Pg 45

March 20, 2014

My Cell Phone and Violence: #1

My cell phone.

My Belgian roots.

My membership in a Christian church.

My wedding band.

The genocide and massive use of rape and sexual torture in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi are connected to these four things. The violence in that land is not a far off horror that has nothing to do with me, nor is it an innate character flaw within the Africans themselves.

The foundation for these atrocities has its roots in “my people” and me.

“In 1885 Belgian King Leopold ‘founded’ the land he called the Congo Free State (later Rwanda and Burundi) as his own private colony. Booker T. Washington wrote an article, “Cruelty in the Congo Country,” where he reported, ‘There was never anything in American slavery that could be compared to the barbarous conditions existing today [1904] in the Congo Free State.’¹ In 1908 King Leopold turned the colony over to Belgium. During the years of Leopold’s rule, the population of the Congo declined from an estimated twenty-five million to less than nine million.”²

Belgium assigned the responsibility for education of the Congolese to the missionaries, staunch supporters of colonialism who were interested in educating men who wanted to go into the priesthood. The first Congolese citizen admitted to a university without heading to the priesthood happened in 1954—the year I was born. “By the eve of Congolese independence in June 1960, the aspiring nation had only sixteen African university graduates out of a population of more than thirteen million. There were no Congolese engineers or physicians.

“Perhaps most crucially, the lack of centralized education left the new nation in a stunted state of growth. Across the African continent, educated Africans had often played a key role in the independence movements, and these leaders had then stepped in to govern the new nations which emerged in the 1960s.”³ Due to Belgian colonial education practices, however, this critical foundation was never built.

Limits to education weren’t the only blows dealt the Congolese by the Belgian missionaries. “The most important legacy of colonialism in Rwanda and Burundi involved the Belgians’ obsession with racial, ethnic classification. The Belgians believed that the Tutsi ethnic group in Rwanda was racially superior to the Hutu ethnic group because the Tutsis had more ‘European’ features.”⁴ They turned ethnic differences, which had long been present, into gasoline-soaked kindling for a bonfire of war.

Though this region is among the poorest in the world, it is resource rich. “It contains 2/3rds of the world’s remaining rainforests, and vast mineral wealth including cobalt, coltan (used in cell phones and other high tech equipment, Congo is home to 80% of the world’s coltan reserves) copper, cadmium, petroleum, diamonds, gold, silver, zinc, manganese, tin, germanium, uranium, radium, bauxite, iron ore, and coal.” ⁵ Greed for these natural resources was also a major influence in the Belgian, and later global, treatment of this country.

Millions have been killed. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people, mainly women, have been brutally raped and tortured. The land has also been raped through extraction of minerals such as coltran.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not taking personal responsibility for actions done generations ago by one of my homeland’s cultural ancestors. I am not refusing to own a cell phone or wear my wedding ring. However, I don’t want to pretend that I don’t see the connections between my life and these horrors.

For decades, my heart has ached for the women who have been brutally raped, their bodies and lives ripped apart. I am grateful that in 2011, many, including Eve Ensler, stepped in to open the “City of Joy” in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo, to serve these women.

Only recently have my thoughts turned to the perpetrators of this violence. How does a human being’s behavior become so twisted that he is capable of torturing, raping, brutalizing and killing? What can be done for the men who have perpetrated this heinous violence? How can there be a turning of the tide within these countries with extreme violence still active in so many men?

What can be done about the foreign and transnational corporations, and the people who run them, who have allowed their lust for riches to lead to violence and economic devastation of people native to this resource-rich land?

I don’t know how to stop these horrors, but I won’t pretend that I don’t see the ways that my cell phone, ancestral homeland, faith tradition and wedding ring have connections to unimaginable horrors.

I woke up to the paradoxes in our world today and won’t go back to sleep. In very concrete ways, I am not disconnected from anyone or anyplace on earth. I pray that my life, and my small and large everyday choices, will support the Great Turning so needed in our world today.

1. “The Booker T. Washington Papers,” University of Illinois Press (1904): 8, 85, http://www.historycooperative.org/btw/Vol.8/html/85.html.

2. Thurston, Nancy, Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Gender, Power and Class (Portland: Rosegate Press, 2012), 325

3. http://www.ultimatehistoryproject.com/belgian-congo.html

4. http://geography.about.com/od/belgiummaps/a/Belgian-Colonialism.htm

5. http://www.healafrica.org/learn/history-of-the-congo/

March 15, 2014

Small Topics at Midnight: Behind and Under

Tomato plant grows in compost bin — Tomato plant grows from compost bin

Compost worked deep within the field.

A young girl standing tall on top of a 1954 Chevy.

Little videos have their own stories to tell. Next year’s harvest depends on rich compost today. A book cover in 2012 requires a snapshot taken over fifty years earlier.

Past and future, light and dark—paradoxes meet in the middle.

Big Topics as Compost and Cover Stories: Behind the Scenes are out in the light of day on my website and You Tube Channel.

nancy-and-sky — Nancy and West Texas sky

January 27, 2014

A Circle of Wisdom #3: Water Speaks

Water spoke to me. In 2005, standing on my family’s ancestral land in North Carolina and deep in my imagination, I felt the gathering of rocks and plants, moon and water, people and animals. Each had come from ages past to share their wisdom with me.

I first hear the drops at a distance. A gentle dance of water on leaves. Rain begins to fall from the sky, one puffy white cloud in an otherwise clear expanse. I laugh. For the past week I have been hurrying around trying to avoid the rain in North Carolina. Hurry to put up my tent before the rain starts, hurry to take it down so it stays dry, wait to drive until after the storm passes. I acted as if rain was some sort of enemy. Here, sitting around this council fire, the rain again finds me. This time I relax back and let the drops splash on my warm skin, a welcome relief from the heat.

A voice comes with the splashing of the drops as they land in the clay pot at the edge of our circle. “I am water. Most of this earth is water. You plants and animals are mostly water, just like me. Long, long ago the waters gathered together and splashed on this barren land. From my undulating womb was birthed the beginning of all of life on this small planet. The water that flows through your veins, bathes your tissues, flows over the earth, and falls from the sky is the same water that was present in Life’s birthing. Water that was, water that is, water that always will be.

In and out of the skies, the oceans and your bodies; I long to be on the move. Washing, cleansing, bathing, freshening.

Water is one of the primary gifts that brings life on this little planet. My free flowing was intended to wash on everyone, without cost.

In recent years I am being robbed of my gift to the world. Now in too many places I am dirty and dangerous before I even touch the ground. Far too often I am filled with poisons by the time I flow into the river, killing the very life that I am entrusted to surround and nourish. Even in the wildness of the ocean, I too often carry the death of spilled oil, toxins and garbage along my waves. Instead of providing life-giving water I am too often forced to carry contamination. Now many of my raindrops are tears of grief.

In the end, I will survive. If this abuse continues, you humans and many of you plants and animals may die out.

You have forgotten. How you treat me, waters of the earth and waters of your bodies, is how you treat yourself. How you see me is how you see yourself. We are not separate. We all flow from the sacred heart to be of service to all of life. All of creation joins my plea to you humans; open your eyes and see anew with gratitude the gift that flows from the beginning to the end. Step into the river, into the living water, as part of the family of life. I want to flow abundantly and again offer life to all.”

Silence returns to the circle, broken only by a short burst before the rain ends. Long after the rain has stopped, drops continue to fall from the forest leaves. The trees know how to relish a good rain for a long time.

This writing is excerpted from “A Circle of Wisdom” that flowed from an experience near my family’s ancestral land in North Carolina and the depths of my imagination. I’ll share parts of the wisdom I “heard”—from water, rocks, plants and animals—in this blog series.

January 22, 2014

A Circle of Wisdom #2: Rocks Speak

Rocks spoke to me. Standing on my family’s ancestral land in North Carolina in 2006 and deep in my imagination, I felt the gathering of rocks and plants, moon and water, people and animals. Each had come from ages past to share their wisdom with me.

A rock near the fire begins to vibrate and a dull glow shines from within. This rock, a mixture of quartz, sulphur, and basalt, begins to speak, “We remember. Some of us remember the molten lava that spewed liquid rocks from the center of the newborn earth. Others of us hold the memory of the ages pressed into our layers. We have experienced the power of creation and fire at the heart of the world.

We have seen much and have been deep within this land for billions of years. Some of us are strong, some soft and pliable. Each of us offering what is needed, in function, beauty and healing.

Animals, without knowing it, come to the place where we are resting to receive our healing power. Plants grow in different ways in different places due to our energy from deep within the earth. Humans over the thousands of years have made use of us and been grateful for our varied gifts.”

A strong voice interrupts, “Gold here. Humans singled me out and have been particularly grateful for me. But this honor too often led to greed rather than respect … with earth breaking results.

Near here, in Dahlonega, GA, white settlers found me. That was the final impetus to remove the Cherokee from this valuable land.”

Mining by white men’s companies started immediately. In time, mining technology sped up our extraction so money could flow quicker. High-pressure water was turned on the land washing away tons of earth and snapping trees like twigs. The earth was gashed and ripped away as my veins were laid bare. A few men become rich and the rest of us died a little more.

Lust for us declined when oil and gas became valued above all else, including life. Whenever minerals, rocks or crystals are quickly extracted from this earth, the land is slashed and the tailings discarded. The gashes are horrifying.” The earth beneath my feet shutters with the memory. Gold is silent again.

The rock in our midst continues, “But the tragedy is that the full gift of us minerals, rocks and crystals is usually overlooked today. We are treated as irrelevant hunks of earth.

It is too often forgotten that we who touch the Earth’s core, streak through the mountains, and lie in wait under the prairies have so much to offer.

We have been taken and used. We helped a few get rich or build things. Meanwhile the earth lies with her wounds ignored and our healing energy is considered primitive nonsense.

You know and use my quartz in your instruments, but her energetic ability to help support harmony between you humans and the universe is ignored. Many have figured out how to use us for building things but few humans around the world remember how to listen to rocks, crystals and minerals anymore. This forgetting comes just at a point where our memory and our power are most needed by you.

Listen. You are sitting on a firm foundation. We hold the memory of creation. We can help guide the way and heal you. Listen and receive. It is time to come home to us, the rocks of the earth.”

In a few months, Howard and I are traveling to the Grand Canyon the wild, red rocks of Utah. Something happens to me when I stand on ancient rocks. I can more easily slip out of my mind, and into the now. I hear the wisdom of the rocks that spoke at the Council of Wisdom that gathered in my imagination, the rocks that adorn my writing space and the rocks that hide or loom hight all around the world around me.