Culture

September 16, 2013

The Eight-eyed Steam Girl is a Woman Now: My life as Myth

I was born an Eight-eyed Steam Girl. The fire of natural gas and oil shot through me from below; ancient waters poured down from above. The mixing was wild and chaotic. Fluid emotions and flaming passion combined to propel me down the tracks, rocking back and forth with my own rhythm. I could see where I was going even though I had no map in hand. A different sort of sight was required for my trip through life. And I had lots of sight—eight eyes. Not just the two typical face eyes but eyes of my heart, hands, feet and one right in the middle of my forehead.

Other folks thought all that sight and steam was too much in one little girl. My “extra” eyeballs were lassoed and tucked out of sight. The “unsightly” steam was controlled by a careful wrapping of my entire body with a beautiful skein of yarn, stopping up all of the “unsightly” eruptions of steam.

Luckily, I was a smart girl. I learned how to navigate with two eyes and my rational, logical mind, all propelled by the limited amount of steam that escaped around my full body wrapping.

Until now.

It’s time for a change. My rhythm has long been strong and powerful, but limping. Not connected to the heart of myself. Trying hard to adapt to the demanding gallop of the culture around me. I wanted to find the real me once again.

I released my eyeballs from their hiding spot and laid the beautiful yarn unwrapped from around my body in a knitting basket. Part of me danced with delight. But my two, overused eyeballs and my brain, so long in charge, screamed and shouted in fear. “Don’t go. You are throwing away the best ways to navigate through life. You’ll never be able to keep everything straight, get anything done, be efficient again.”

Nonsense. But sometimes, too many sometimes, I still believe this fearful voice. Chaos is harder to navigate than tried and true to-do lists. What would happen in my life, I wondered, if too many things fell through the cracks?

For over fifty years I’d kept my inner lid tightly closed so I could adjust to the world. It was time now to quit pretending I was someone else.

In my wrapped up days, I’d over accommodated, tried to be the woman others needed me to be, nice and supportive-like. It was EXHAUSTING. I’d been trying to fuel my life with limited sight and truncated energy.

Now is the time. I was born an Eight-eyed Steam Girl, and now I’m older. Coming home to myself. Learning new songs and dances.

Wild, wise and a little crazy, I’ll find my own way to dance with steam, see every which way and sing with all parts of myself.

In the middle of writing Big Topics at Midnight, I played with telling my life story as a myth. Instantly, I had the image of an Eight-eyed Steam Girl in her Little Red Boat. I told her story from birth until high school. As I struggled to find a way to step into a more intuitive, Spirit-guided way of shepherding my book for this second year, I returned to the myth to see how my story would look right now, as I moved toward my 60^th birthday.

For a more extensive peek into my personal myth, see Big Topics at Midnight, pages 306-308.

September 12, 2013

A Different Kind of Patriot

“On September 11, 2001, Dad began his three-week walk toward death. In life, Dad was in charge. But when his crisis hit, he began to let go. He was transformed by the process, and found a new way to live his dying.

On the morning Dad found out he was dying, hijacked planes crashed into buildings that epitomized US economic, military and governmental power. The nation responded with talk of war and patriotic pride rather than grief and introspection. With that choice, the violence continued.”*

This September, I hear the beating of the war drums yet again. In order to move forward, I first need to look back to my lifetime of wars/CIA violence/military action, beginning in 1954:

Guatemala 1953-1990s

Middle East 1956-58

Indonesia 1957-58

British Gulana/Guyana 1953-64

Vietnam 1950-73

Cambodia 1955-75

Congo/Zaire 1960-65

Brazil 1961-64

Dominican Republic 1963-66

Cuba 1959-present

Indonesia 1965

Laos 1971-73

Chile, 1964-73

Greece 1964-74

East Timor, 1975-99

Nicaragua 1978-89

Grenada 1979-84

Libya 1981-89

Grenada 1983-84

Panama 1989-90

Iraq 1990s

Kuwait 1991, 96

Afghanistan 1979-92

El Salvador 1980-92

Haiti 1987-95

Iran and Kuwait 1991

Somalia 1992-94

Yugoslavia 1999

Iraq 1991, 1998, 2003-2011

Afghanistan 2001-present

Pakistan 2005-06

This doesn’t include the violence of our government and citizens against other citizens based on race, class, gender, gender-identity, nationality, religion…

Far too often, these wars didn’t resolve the root issues, resulted in extensive civilian and military deaths and trauma, and resulted in the diversion of money and human energy from community and people centered needs.

Dad’s choice of surrender to his grief and his clear personal introspection led to Life, even in his death. I pray that one day soon my country will begin to make alternative, powerful choices other continuing to use violence to deal with violence.

This long history of marching to war again and again is one part of our national story. The other part includes profound acts of generosity and compassion done by Americans and the US.

It is a wide paradox to hold.

The patriots I want to honor on “Patriot Day” are those who are fighting for justice and equity—within themselves, in their neighborhoods, in our nation and around the world. These patriots are many and their work is varied.

To each and every one of you, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

*Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself (Portland: Rosegate Press, 2012) page 145.

Khara Scott-Bey’s illustration in Big Topics at Midnight is from the chapter that speaks to Dad’s dying from lung cancer as our country begin its long march to war.

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.

August 6, 2013

What It Means to be White

What is it like for me to have white skin in our world today?

The only time I thought about skin color as a young girl was in the middle of an art project. As a young artist who finally learned that people don’t have purple or green skin, I always looked for the “flesh” colored crayon.
Most of my life has been lived primarily surrounded by other white Americans. This long string of racially homogeneous neighborhoods and social circles kept me blind to the racism inherent in the opportunities and experiences I’d learned to take for granted.

I recently read about the history of whites in Hawaii. It was filled in greed, violence, theft and racism against all non-white peoples, including the native Hawaiians. It is a story that has been repeated in Haiti, Central America and Africa. This is not just history, it is happening today.

Looking at the hard truths of my own story as a white woman is the subject of my latest YouTube video. I have to stand in the paradox of both horrors and generosity of white people and white culture in order to discover what it means to me, personally, to be a white woman. Noticing and diving deeply into my own whiteness has helped me gain perspective on my privilege, our history and our universal challenges as we move forward toward justice.

Are you ready to look at your own life, including the implications of your skin color, and see yourself in a bigger context of truth?

July 30, 2013

I Must Speak: A Time to Break Silence #2

In the process of updating my blogs’ categories and tags, I noticed that I omitted one posting from my series on A Time to Break Silence. And not just a random one, but my most personal blog about the topic. Mistake? Freudian blip? What should I do–just ignore it, add it in to part #3 or send it out now even though it is out of sequence? Obviously, I decided on the latter. Life isn’t always neat and in the right order…

It is terrifying to speak knowing that my vision is limited. I don’t want to appear stupid or insensitive or disrespectful.

Sometime I blurt things out. Come on too strong. Get emotional. Exaggerate.

Big emotions scare me. I resonate with Dr. King:

“… some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night

have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony,

but we must speak.

We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision,

but we must speak.”

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.*

“The calling to speak is often a vocation of agony” for me. Yet I was called to write a book about the hot topics of race, class and gender. I know much more about myself and the world around me than I did years ago. Yet, I still have limited vision.

These fears that bang around inside of me had me quiet for far too long. Since I care about our world, quiet is a luxury I can no longer afford. The times call for us all to step into the fullness of our sight and to speak our dreams and visions of situations where actions and beliefs are out of alignment with that dream.

The challenge goes beyond merely knowing that I must speak what is true for me. I must also take responsibility for what I say and how I say it. Venting my frustration or anger may be needed in preparation for speaking—taking the time to process with a close friend as I work toward my own clarity, for example—but it rarely helps move a conversation forward to speak from my initial emotional reaction.

I need to remember what I know. About myself. About the bigger partnership I seek with individuals and with generations to follow me. About the spirit at the heart of the other, even people with whom I disagree. I want my words to be in line with my own spirit and my vision for myself and the world around me.

What does it mean for me to be in true partnership with myself, with others, with my nation, with generations now and those to come? What is my responsibility to be in conversation, to stop ancient patterns of disrespect or assumptions or behaviors that are part of the power dynamic or beliefs that have done so much damage over the generations?

Now is a time to break silence. Not in the abstract, but daily, speaking what is true for me, always remembering the deeper love that undergirds my life’s work.

Second in a series honoring *Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Beyond Vietnam–A Time to Break Silence, Delivered April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City. The next in the series is titled “Race, Class and Violence.”

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 6, 2013

What Cannot be Found at Home

When we surround ourselves with people just like ourselves, our world shrinks. Our options narrow.

Though life felt manageable when the world was tucked into my hands, too much was left out. I wanted a more spacious home, a world that stretched around the globe and across the generations.

On that expansive journey, I stepped outside of the confines of my white-skinned neighborhood and the American Dream of climbing the traditional ladder of success. I heard stories from perspectives I’d never considered. I saw injustice and compassion that had always been present outside of my field of vision. I discovered that wealth didn’t have to be soulless, that diversity enriched my life and that abundance could take on many forms.

This is the topic I explored in my latest YouTube video, posted on my website.

How big would you like your world to be?

April 23, 2013

Please, Not Another War

“I hope we don’t go to war because of this.”

After the horror of the Boston marathon bombing, this fear of national retaliation hovered in many conversations last week.

It is hard enough to sort through the feelings about the death and injuries, but to simultaneously juggle the fear of war is too much.

It was a violent week. Boston. West, Texas with the Fertilizer Plant fire. Corinth, Mississippi with the poison tainted letters mailed to President Obama and Senator Roger Wicker. The defeat of the gun control laws. Fifty killed on the streets of Baghdad last Monday. Nuclear plans afoot in North Korea. Violent deaths in Darfur, Nigeria and Iraq.

Many people rushed in to help in all of these situations. Lives were saved even as others were lost. Miracles and gifts amid the horror.

It is hard for a person or nation to hold so much grief and shock. It is easier to turn to scapegoating or retaliation, dividing the world into “us” and “them,” “good guys” and “bad guys.” Another option is to stay with the painful feelings that tragedies stir up in us, sinking into the reality that life is never really safe.

Unfortunately, being with our raging fears and vulnerability as they move through and out of our minds and bodies is a skill that we in the West have been slow to practice.

On the other side of our fear of the inevitability of death and the possibility of terror, is the possibility of cherishing each new day and our relationships with others. In the midst of joy and woe, transformation is possible.

I pray, along with my daughter, Laura, and many others: I hope we don’t go to war because of this.

March 13, 2013

Not at Memoir

I didn’t want to write a memoir! I tried every other form I could, yet each one fell short. Stubbornly, I kept searching for anything-but-memoir.

I knew that an academic exploration of the big topics couldn’t bring the level of transformation I was seeking. I also knew that some of my experiences would be needed to illustrate my point. But surely, I told myself, essays sprinkled with a few stories would be enough.

In the end, memoir was the only structure strong enough to carry all that is held in Big Topics at Midnight. Ironically, it wasn’t just one memoir—my ancestors showed up wanted their stories included too.

Memoir kept my exploration personal. No generalities or “people should” or finger pointing. I had to keep diving back into my own life to wake up again and again to what I saw and didn’t see, what belief I assumed was true that was, in fact, true and what wasn’t. Little details of memories gave huge information—for instance noticing that the fact we had called our black maid “Mary” and not “Mrs. Henderson” said volumes from the lips of a good little girl who ALWAYS called adults by Mr. or Mz. (Texas slang for Mrs. or Miss.)

The more I saw of my life and my assumptions, and the more feelings that got stirred up, the more I had to stop and do my own inner work to bring my actions in line with my heart and values. I had to change.

I had to learn new tools to do this demanding work. I am skilled in the methods affirmed by school and home—logic, rational thought and hard work. Those were helpful, but proved woefully inadequate for the task of waking up to the ways race, class and gender had become tangled and divisive in my own mind and in the world around me. And the old ways were definitely inadequate in helping me to access my intuitive wisdom, learning to listen to my body, the earth under my feet, creativity or Spirit. I had to re-remember the more feminine ways of knowing that I had long ago judged as weak and tried to shove to the side.

Sometimes the very things I fight are the most valuable. When will I ever learn?

March 4, 2013

Old dog. New tricks.

Some days fifty-eight feels like being an “old dog,” but I do want to learn new tricks. For one, I want to release my inner taskmaster who demands that I finish my tasks even though my back aches and I can barely see straight.

No matter that I just published a book that includes my resignation letter from such relentless old voices. It may be in print, but it is slower to be lived in the flesh.

No matter that I have spent seven years learning how to listen to my intuitive guidance, trusting the divine mystery to open doors before I arrive.

Some days old habits grab hold of my ankles and hold me to the grindstone.

As a young woman, I thought I’d get past this by the time I was middle-aged. But here I am, once again.

Welcome.

I’m trying to open my heart to my inner taskmaster. She has something to say. I’d like to begin to hear her as only one of my inner voices, rather than the loudest one.

My overdeveloped sense of responsibility has held me to my family and culture’s values of efficiency, planning and organization above all. In many areas of my life, this training has served me well. But not when it comes to walking through the potholes surrounding race, class, gender, and my connection to Spirit and the Earth.

I guess the new trick I’m learning is how to be patient with myself and see the vicissitudes of the life, inside my head and around me, with a sense of humor.