Ancestors

January 17, 2014

A Circle of Wisdom: The Moon Speaks

I spent a hot and stormy night in Franklin, North Carolina in 2006. In the sweltering afternoon before the storm, I walked from the center of town, down the hill beside the road busy with traffic, past the auto shop and the Carpet store, across from the Hot Spot gas station. Nestled in this unlikely place was a big, grassy area mound at least twice my height and as big as my living room.

Later that night in the midst of the storm, an unexpected council began to gather seen only by the eyes of my heart. Over the next month, the fullness of the council came to me and spoke. Despite our different “languages” we communicated without difficulty.

The plump full moon spoke first from her far off perch.

“Millions of years ago, something wild and filled with Love pulsed through the vast empty space. At just the right moment all of the elements floating in the abyss were irresistibly pulled together into a giant fireball. The explosion consumed everything and filled all that was. This sacred fire burned for nearly a million years. From this fiery beginning billions and billions of galaxies formed, including ours. On your planet swirled the perfect combination of elements warmed by the sun, and a wild diversity of life was birthed. Stardust is woven into everything, into you and into me. While the primeval soup of the universe churned, this planet and everything on it was pulled together through the attraction of gravity. Throughout it all a voice full of delight cried out, ‘It is GOOD, it is VERY GOOD!”

All is held together by a dance of attraction. This includes my round body, the rocks, the earth and each of your bodies. There is a pull within our atoms, our molecules and your living cells that keeps us all dancing together. In that way, in a way of mystery beyond all telling of it, this entire universe is held together by attraction. You can call it gravity, if you prefer. Call it whatever you want.

In truth, we are held together by Love.

All of us, from rocks, to trees, to me, to you humans, we have all that we need. We are and we live, and that is enough. You humans, set in the middle of this ever-creating cosmos, have something additional. You were given the ability to witness and reflect on the beauty and mystery and glory of creation. That is a great gift, but not an easy one. It would be impossible for you to carry the responsibility of witnessing the beauty and shouldering the crucial stewardship alone. But you were never meant to do it alone. The Love at the center of it all guides the way. The rest of creation is ready to help.

If you humans will only ask and listen.”

Moon is quiet for a moment. We all know that humans have so rarely asked or listened, especially in the last few hundred years. All around us creation groans in sighs too deep for words.

Soon Moon continues, “This sky that looks bright under the sun’s rays by day and dark with twinkles by night is the powerful Mother of all. The Mother cosmos exploded in birth when touched with the Loving divine. Earth, and all of you in this council gathered around the fire, are filled with all that is needed for abundant life. It is an exquisite gift to all sisters and brothers of creation.

Don’t forget. We are all one family, part of a vast universe held together with Love.”

I shiver in amazement at the breadth and wildness of my cosmic home. I have spent most of my life trying to shrink the universe into something small and manageable. I had pictured the world like a small globe, the universe something I could hold in my hand.

It was easier that way.

It was also a lie.

… It is now January 2014. In these times when it feels like so much is crashing around us, it is good for me to remember the deeper truth–we are all held together by Love.

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.

December 28, 2013

Death in a Season of Birth

The call came in the middle of the night—a shrill ring startling me awake from a dead sleep.

It was Dad calling to tell me that my mother was “gone.” He couldn’t yet say the stark word “dead.”

That call came twenty-seven years ago last week. This holiday, I heard of one death after another—Richard, Skipper, Gabe, Brian, Shirley, Nelson and people whose names I only know as Dad, Mom and Grandpa. None of these people were in my inner circle of friends and family, yet all were people I cared about or were loved by them.

Each of these deaths involved phone calls no one wants to make or receive. Death here in the season where we celebrate birth.

I know the light is returning on this side of the winter solstice, but in the dark of night, the ever-present reality of death has settled deep in my bones.

In this upcoming year I will turn sixty, the age of my mother when she died.

My knee aches. Howard’s hearing diminishes. What will aging take from us?

Death and loss pace just outside the door of my life, and at this moment I’m afraid that someone I love dearly might be next.

Several years ago, I selected songs to honor Howard’s and my thirty-five years of marriage. One, “Nothing Lasts Forever,” was based on a poem by the mystic Rabindranath Tagore:

Nothing lasts forever…

keep that in mind,

and love.

To live with an open heart, loving others and life itself, will lead to the sharp pain of grief when death comes. And yet, paradoxically, full-hearted loving despite the fact that “nothing lasts forever,” it is only path to joy.

It takes courage to be awake and present in our lives. Rather than push my fear of loss away too quickly, I sit in the dark of night and let it soften me. Now is what we have each been given. Tomorrow is mystery.

Writing is one of the ways I make sense of my life and my feelings. Putting these words on paper didn’t make the fear evaporate, but it reminded me once again of the solid foundation that trust and courage offer all of me, including my loving heart and frightened bones. Someday soon, my fears will settle as they have many times before.

When that happens, I will remember that life and death are two sides of the same coin. And both are normal and safe.

September 2, 2013

What Would Grandma Say about This?

I am delighted that death didn’t stop my grandmothers from telling me about their lives. Fact and intuition, family stories and playful imagination came together for me as I wrote Big Topics at Midnight. In this fifth YouTube video, I explore how I gained a deeper understand of my roots and when I turned an ear to generations long past.

No special training was required. Just a willingness to set aside my skeptical mind and listen with an open heart. You too can tap into the wisdom of your past, to uncover both the mistakes and marvels of your family history, and to see your life as connected to generations yet to come.

My grandmothers Ann Cahoon Mathys and Ruth Owen Tipps both both had their photographs taken in the same position sitting on a rock. Ann was teaching in California and Ruth was living in Texas at the time. They wanted to give you a glimpse of their love of dance (Ann) and story-telling (Ruth) here. I love sharing a website with family writings and photographs across the generations.

For more videos poke around my website or visit my YouTube Channel.

August 29, 2013

“What is my emotional inheritance?”

That question jumped off the page in Colette Winlock’s book Undoing Crazy.* Earlier in the novel, when “Mama” spoke about her childhood in Love, Texas in the 1930s, I was thrown back into my memories growing up in West Texas in the 1950s and 1960s.

What was the emotional inheritance passed down to me from generations of my white-skinned family living in North Carolina, Tennessee then Texas?

I can still hear Mom’s voice telling me that emotions aren’t trustworthy. “Don’t let emotions detract you from the work to be done.” “Emotions have no place in the Church.” “Responsibility is more important than how you feel.”

I was taught to think critically. To be curious. To study. And yet, we were discouraged from thinking, or noticing, the Big Topics like racism, sexism or classism.

My grandfather O.R. Tipps, an attorney, was direct in a letter he wrote to his daughter, my mother, in 1945—“Social reformers all try to make people equal. They can’t do it, and by trying, they impede the best ones and don’t help the weak ones. However, they usually get worked up into a lather in trying to get some law, or some tradition, or some precedent changed to make each and every person exactly equal.”

What laws, traditions or precedents did he mean? Redlining? Segregation? Black codes? Jim Crow? Lynching?

How much was my family’s emotional inheritance stunted in the clash between our valuing of intellectual analysis of every topic except the big public ones?

Part of us had to go to sleep to live in the face of such a stark contradiction. We were trained not to notice anything that didn’t fit into the official, white-skinned, USA self-image of rock-solid values of democracy and justice for all.

My family was politically moderate, Christian and thoughtful. I never heard my parents make a racist statement or treat individuals disrespectfully based on the color of their skin.

Yet, in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called my family to task: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice…Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”

My family’s silence spoke volumes, and perpetuated injustice.

The cost of our sleep was profound.

Believing so deeply in law-and-order yet averting our eyes to injustice (or feeling bad, but doing nothing) stunted our emotional inheritance. It is impossible to be profoundly asleep in one area of our lives and be vibrantly alive in the rest of life.

For me personally, I still struggle to notice, then pay attention, to my own emotions. But the cost to my nation is far more serious. How else can we explain our deep sleep to the reality of inequity, injustice and environmental destruction all around us?

I want to leave a different emotional legacy to generations yet to come.

* Colette Winlock. Undoing Crazy (Oakland: Oaktown Press, 2013), 293.

July 27, 2013

Ancestors: Memoir #4

My ancestors’ “memoirs” intertwine with my story in Big Topics at Midnight. I have a few photos and letters, but all of my parents and grandparents have long since died. I know nothing of séances, nor have I had previous experience communicating with ancestors. But as I dove into my own life and the story of my nation’s people, I wanted to know more about how my family was woven into history.

I had to suspend my skepticism in order to hear what they had to say. I returned to Mom’s genealogical research, brought family stories to mind, let my imagination go and listened with my heart.

Then I went to my computer and wrote down what I heard, using their voices. My female ancestors “spoke” first, one at a time, beginning with my grandmothers, Ann and Ruth, followed by my mother Sue. Seven generations of Tipps grandmothers spoke to me, from my mother back to Margaret who married Jacob, son of our family’s original immigrant, Lorenz.

Grace, the only one of thirteen slaves of Margaret and Jacob whose name made it through the generations, also had her say. Later, my father, Ed, and grandfathers,

O.R. and John, told me tidbits about their lives.

I was shocked at the power of the stories that emerged as each ancestor spoke in her or his unique voice. A number of them demanded to be included in this book.* I’d learned the futility of arguing with some of these people while they were alive, so I thought it best just to honor their requests. Their stories wove in and out of my own.

Are their stories true? All of them referenced documented moments of their lives, but each went beyond these details. Some might call their stories tall tales. Regardless, I heard their words as truth stronger than facts.

Listening to their stories helped me remember that the DNA that swirls through my body has roots that weave back through the generations and will continue to generations yet unborn. As I wove my ancestors’ and descendents’ memoirs with my own, I saw that the context of my life—and the implication of my choices and behavior—had grown from my one lifetime to include at least fourteen generations.

Sometimes we must immerse ourselves in the past to learn to be present.

*An audio recording with three ancestral memoir stories and a bit of my own memoir is on my website.

This is part four of five of my blog’s Memoir series. Much of this post is included in the introduction of Big Topics at Midnight.

July 15, 2013

Moon: Memoir #3

As I wrote Big Topics at Midnight, the moon waxed and waned across the pages. She was silently shinning over events in the lives of my family:

My grandmother six generations back, the newly widowed Barbara, sat with her newborn and noted with gratitude, Mary Lou and the little sliver of a moon shinin’ outside my window call me back to life. (pg 21)

Elizabeth, my grandmother five generations back, reflected on the night her life turned around, Under the moonless sky filled with twinklin’ stars, my heart broke open like the ice on Tennessee mountain rivers come spring. (pg 181)

Looking up at the moon, I find myself within a universe wider than I can imagine. For me, as for Barbara and Elizabeth in their stories, Lady Moon brings the fullness of the universe close to our hearts, setting life’s crises and joys within the cosmic time frame.

My book reflects that sometimes the moon was a metaphor for far away places or life beyond death:

Great-Great-Grandmother Joanna stayed in the family homeland of Belgium when her infant grandson John and his parents emigrated to the US. As she waved and cried, She knew that soon my parents and I would sail out of her life to a place so far away it might as well be the moon. (pg 16)

John and I are now free to Tango on the clouds, tap on the stars, and turn cartwheels on the moon, recalls Grandmother Ann as she and her husband dance across the heavenly skies after their deaths. (pg 343)

Since the moon has a front row seat to comings and goings here on Earth, I started listening to what she might say for herself. I figured she had a unique perspective that she’d be willing to share:

You, like me, can reflect light effortlessly. Without urgency, moon told to me as I held my newborn Laura in my arms. (pg 98)

One night Moon, taking to those who gathered on a North Carolina Cherokee mound in my imagination, said … In that way, in a mystery beyond all telling, this entire universe is held together by attraction. You can call it gravity if you prefer. Call it whatever you want. (pg 294)

Lady Moon is beautiful and, like a women, moves through her cycle each month. We all watch our one moon rising and falling, from fat and round to a thin crescent, each night that she shows her face. She rises over my life as she rose over my ancestors nearer the dawn of time and will rise over generations yet unborn. The moon is a reminder of the unity we share across geography and time.

Listen closely to that “woman in the moon” tonight.

This is third in a series (following Getting Naked and Nature) about the diversity of the “memoirs” held within Big Topics at Midnight.

June 16, 2013

Thank you Dad

I always wanted to please my Dad. But he wasn’t much of a little kid person, and I was full of life and questions and energy. I also wanted to please. It wouldn’t have taken much from Dad to shut me down–a short shout and I would quickly learn what behaviors to avoid around him. I did my “be careful what I say and do around Dad so he won’t get upset with me” dance until I was in my mid 20.

Mom and Dad had come up to see Howard and I just after I’d sent out a family letter saying that we were considering joining the Peace Corps or returning to graduate school. Mom went to battle trying to convince us that the Peace Corp would be a stupid thing to do. Dad listened most of the evening, then said the words that sparked our new relationship. Nine years later, after Mom died, Dad’s and my relationship deepened even more.

Thank you Dad. In your eighty years of living and in your three weeks of dying, you gave me profound gifts.

Ed Mathys, age 57, 1979*

On that night in Boise as you shared your dreams and ideas, I glimpsed a pattern. Men in our family have loved strong women, and then tried to tame them again and again.

In Boise, I realized I’m done trying to be in charge.

Sue can march into wars if she’d like. Not me.

Why did I think life was a contest? That I’d shine brighter if you faded and became quiet like me? If I step back in time I see you were a normal three-year-old, growing up. Not a threat, just full of life.

If I could do it again … Actually, I did. Twenty-two years after I squelched you, I supported your desire to do something wild.

It’s never too late. When you heard my heart, the healing began.

Excerpted from Big Topics at Midnight, page 73, 74.

May 28, 2013

Our Financial Legacy

Laura often moans, “Why can’t you be like other parents?”

When Howard and I wrote a letter to our then teenaged children, Laura and Paul, outlining the financial legacy we wanted to leave to them, we began with that sentence. An excerpt of that letter continues as follows; “It is true that our worldview is different from many others. This letter is an attempt to speak to you two about one of the legacies that we hope to leave you. It is counter cultural, but it has come through years of searching our hearts, listening to the stories of people around the globe, and studying the Gospels in an attempt to see beyond our ‘American’ interpretation of scripture and faith.

“First, a brief family history. Your maternal great grandparents, O.R. and Ruth Tipps, lived the American Dream. They started with very little money and died wealthy. O.R. was involved in many things—a teacher first, then County Judge (where he could use the law books to pass the bar exam), lawyer, rancher, oilman. Ruth was a teacher before marriage (that was where she met O.R.), and she cared for an extended family after marriage. She was also a wonderful storyteller. They lived modestly and were generous with extended family.

“The other set of your maternal great-grandparents, Ann and John Mathys, also had more money than most. John came to this country as an infant. His parents owned a successful tavern in Green Bay and sent money back to help support the family who remained in Belgium. John became a Vice President of Northrup King Seed Company and made his own wealth. Ann got her master’s degree, a very unusual thing in her day, but she was not allowed to teach after she married. They were not as wealthy as O.R. and Ruth Tipps but they lived a more affluent-looking lifestyle.

“Your paternal grandparents and great-grandparents, the Thurston and Costello families, were middle class. They had a strong family ethic of saving and frugality that led to a comfortable lifestyle with enough saved that your Thurston grandparents enjoyed international travel during their retirement years.

“Our family’s financial success is partially a result of all of their hard work, vision and saving decisions. But that isn’t the whole story. All wage earners are not afforded equal opportunities to excel and make money through their hard work. Your maternal grandfathers (through whom our family wealth came) had many advantages before they began to work. They were male (this was especially vital for those in business at that time), they were white-skinned (the only option for most careers and professions at that time, and still a huge benefit), they were U.S. Americans (with our globally more affluent lifestyle and with our business opportunities and laws aimed to support businesses) and they had access to education through family support and a valuing of education. Without those things and others, doors would not have opened so quickly for them to become successful and prosperous. That doesn’t negate their success, but it does put it into an important context.

… “Our family gets lots of benefits from this wealth and we could follow the cultural norm of spending more extravagantly and passing on the remainder of the inheritance to you two. But, for us, that is too narrow a focus. We consider our extended family to be the global family. Ultimately what is best for the extended family is best for our little family of four. The world will be a safer place for all of us to live, the earth will be more vibrant and healthy, and the community between people will be healthier when there is more financial equity between all peoples. There are enough money and commodities globally to provide for all on the earth, but it has gotten “dammed up” and blocked in the hands of wealthy individuals (like us) and corporations. In our own small but powerful way, we want to participate in undamming our portion of the world’s wealth and letting things flow smoothly again.”

Howard and I still had lots of financial questions to answer, but we wanted to share our overarching clarity with Paul and Laura as it emerged. The conversations continue today, eleven years later.

What would you say to your children, or the next generation of children, about the financial legacy you’d like to leave behind?

May 11, 2013

A Legacy of Art

Mothers Day this year falls on the day my mother, Sue Mathys, gave birth to me fifty-nine years ago. Though Mom died when she was a year older than I am now, her presence surrounds me.

Her wooden and fiber ostriches reside in the living room. Huge cloth books lean against boxes of Big Topics at Midnight. “Houston is Green” in fabric and embroidery hangs above my couch, reminding me that Portland is also green. Her genealogy work enabled me to dive deeply into my ancestors in my writing.

I am my mother’s daughter.

I grew up not only with art hanging on the walls but also silk-screened Christmas cards drying on the dining room floor, sketches on bits of paper around the house and half-finished stitcheries folded up beside Mom’s living room chair. Now my collages, line drawings and the art of friends surround me in my writing studio. Friends like Khara Scott-Bey, whose art fills my book, and friends like Brenda Wills.

Last week in Newport, Oregon as I read an excerpt from the chapter “Forgiveness by Grace,”* Brenda listened and sketched. Her painting included the ocean at my back, the cathedral of the pines from my reading and me in the room.

How fitting that the artist was Brenda. She is an old friend from my early twenties, and she is one of the few people in my life today who knew my mother. Both of our mothers were artists.

Brenda and I honor our mothers and grandmothers and their art, in whatever form it flowed, on this day honoring all mothers.

*Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself page 274

March 18, 2013

Dancing Grandmother

Years before I was born into the Mathys family, my grandmother Ann Cahoon Mathys danced and taught dancing. She got her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physical education. During her brief tenure at Kansas State University she convinced the Kansas State Legislature to allow women in physical education classes to wear bloomers. She fought for the right for women to vote. She also gave birth to my father, Ed Mathys.

Tucked into a memory box was her Dance Record Book, filled with page after page of dance instructions. On my website, I included a copy of a few pages from this book and a modern rendition of one of the dances she outlined — Little Man in a Fix. Step back in time and visit a small slice of her dance world here.

She is teaching me to dance now, across the generations.