Khara Scott-Bey

November 14, 2013

Listen Up, Honey-Bunchkins

I was stuck. Defeated. Hiding under Mom’s blue afghan.

Luckily I’d “met” a character that could give me just the shove I needed—Hectate, my own combination of the goddess Hecate and my wise inner guide with an attitude the size of Texas. Hectate, never one to mince words, demanded that I get up and do what was mine to do.

She had me put Helen Reddy’s All Time Greatest Hits in the CD player, crank up the volume and sing at the top of my lungs. Hectate wanted to “write” me a letter, so I sat at my computer, fingers poised over my computer keyboard, took a deep breath and waited. My fear and trembling disappeared as Hectate began to “dictate” this:

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Church night in the South

Listen up, Honey-bunchkins,

Your singing sounds great. How polite of you to close the windows first. Still afraid someone will hear you and Helen singing together? Being loud still too wild for you? …

You belted out “I Am Woman” while you danced with the vacuum cleaner as a young woman back in Boise land. Funny how your wildness came out a bit when you cleaned house.

Welcome home to the fullness of your life as a woman. It took you long enough. Fifty-two years old is no spring chicken. The power of the lie is so strong it is hard for women to break through much younger. Especially strong, intelligent women like you.

Like many women of your time, you’ve lived out a strange combination of falling asleep and feeling invincible. You thought you could do it alone, right? At times you almost sank from the weight of your strength. You tried to play by enough of the rules that you could sustain the illusion of your independence from things as messy as sexism and patriarchy. You got a little constipated trying to hold it all in while not noticing. …

$#@* invincibility and strength. They damn near drug you under a few times. …

This society does its little jig, pretending everything is just peachy for everyone. You are living in an insane world. That is not the whole picture, of course. Life’s beautiful, too. But it is the insane part that put you to sleep and is causing such havoc these days. Are you ready to wake up? Are you ready to open your eyes and see things as they really are? …

Time, it is a wasting. Midnight’s near, and it’s hard to see the way. But I need you human women to WAKE UP NOW. You must claim your wisdom and live it in the world. If women continue to remain silent, there is little hope for this little planet. …

You were created with just what you need to thrive, to live fully. You were not created lacking. Quit acting like it. Believe in your greatness, your magnificence and your power. Yes, most of the current world institutions embody a distorted power, dangerous “greatness.” $#@* that shit! You are talking about another kind of power. Don’t be so afraid. Live. NOW. …

If you try to hold back, I’ll drag this out of you. That will really hurt. So get on with it. Generations of women have your back and add their spirits to your breath.

Find that voice of yours, that WOMAN’S voice, and speak it. Living with only part of your wisdom is a luxury the world can no longer afford. None of us. Not men. Not women. Not trees or plants. Not rocks or stars. Not water or flame. Not air or animals or the cosmos. …

Amen, so be it, just do it, have fun along the way and all that. You are never alone. Don’t forget, you have a heavenly posse leading the way.

Blessings, honey-bunchkins, Hectate^*

While I still hide under Mom’s afghan now and then, humming along with Helen now and then helped me to remember Hectate’s straight-to-the-point guidance and put a little kick in my step.

Hectate has made it clear that she wants to share some of her wisdom with a larger audience. She will “take over” Nancy’s facebook author page for her own posts.

*Big Topics at Midnight: A Texas Girl Wakes Up to Race, Class, Gender and Herself (Portland: Rosegate Press, 2012) page 264-266, slightly adapted

Drawing by Khara Scott-Bey, Illustration from Big Topics at Midnight.

October 14, 2013

Standing in the Gap … Together

I suppose we could stack one on top of each other, the way one piece of my collage illustrates, as one way to “stand in the gap” together. One house on top of another on top of another. It is an efficient use of ground space, even if climbing from one house to another is a bit daunting with my middle-aged knees.

Not to mention my fear of heights.

There are all sorts of gaps or crevasses that cut through our world. We are divided by the color of our skin, how much money we have in the bank and all sorts of stuff about our gender.

I can’t wiggle my nose and make these gaps go away, so I want to get inside them along with others to do the work of love, compassion, justice, equity, spiritual transformation—those things powerful enough to build something new, together.

However, I don’t usually think of standing in the gap together as a stacking game. If I stand on your shoulders and someone stands on mine, we will fill up the gap vertically, but we’ll also be exhausted in the process.

I often feel like the weight of the world is on my shoulders without anyone perched up there. I don’t really want you up there, too.

I know that our world is set up to climb ladders. The ladder to success—until you hit the glass ceiling. Jacob’s ladder on the spiritual journey. We’ve tried to build buildings and corporations higher and higher, and our world groans under the weight.

That is not the world I want to help build. I’d rather move with circles or waves or flow. Something more curving, connecting and inclusive. Feminine.

If not one on top of the other, how shall we then stand?

In a circle? Standing side-by-side with linked arms, supporting each other? Is there a way we can share the burden and the gifts?

Playing with images to explore big topics may seem like child’s play, but don’t be fooled. Imagination holds the power to clarify our thinking and propel us to action.

Anyone want to stand in the gap with me?

Drawing by Khara Scott-Bey. Houses photo from my collage box. I explore more about “standing in the gap” in Big Topics at Midnight.

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.

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.

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