99%, Follow the Money

A year ago, saying 99% would have meant nothing. Today many people recognize it as the mantra of the Occupy movement. I wonder how anyone can be surprised by what is going on in the USA. "The problem is not scarcity, it is distribution." So proclaimed my sign at the first Occupy rally I went to. There is no question that we are a rich country. So, follow the money. Any idiot can see that the great majority of our common wealth goes to the military and military related businesses.

I went to a bunch of school events to watch my grandsons in Portland, Oregon. Nice kids, nice schools, nice parents, nice sports, nice plays. The parents were all talking about the cutbacks in the schools. They are hurt and shocked and upset. The prevailing feeling seemed to be that we just don't have the money anymore. I tried to keep a low key tone in my voice as I suggested that with the cost of drones and attacking people all over the planet, and the cost of having very highly paid mercenaries all over the globe, and the cost of all the paramilitary operations we run and the cost of  the million and a half messed up vets returning from occupying Iraq and Afghanistan we could fund a lot of school programs.

"What is she talking about?" was the look on faces when I took the subject out to the obvious. "If we are a democracy, then it is our choice to be the country that spends more on her military than all the other countries in the world combined." We chose to be the country with 23% of her children living in desperate poverty. We chose to have crappy schools if you don't happen to be in the 1% neighborhoods.

Not one person I spoke with engaged in this conversation. It seemed to be a much more comfortable arena to moan about gym class cut backs and stay in a safe bubble. Everything is interconnected. As this gets more and more obvious because of communications, I think it has become overwhelming for many to face the implications of the information. If , as has happened for some years now, reports come from Yemen almost daily about drone strikes killing random people and our government denies it, so there. Then, when the government has to confirm because of overwhelming evidence, they say it is necessary and we go, "OK", and don't seem to wonder how many homeless kids each drone strike in Yemen will create here in our own back yard, to say nothing of in Yemen. Where the hell is Yemen? My taxes keep funding murder in places I can't even find on a map.

Maybe the new best way to teach geography would be to spend a year locating all the places in the world where we have military and paramilitary actions going on. We could find some of the more honest reasons in Wikileak documents.

I, for one, think the great fight with the best chance for a sustained win would be to feed, house, and educate more and more people, starting right here at home. I think it is all very simple. Poor people need money, hungry people need food, homeless people need homes. We need to put our hands and hearts together and do the right thing.

Giving and getting: The real deal energy exchange

Are the most unselfish deeds the most selfish ones? If you want to make yourself feel good, then do something good for someone else. I don't mean for your kids or your mother, that is necessary and expected. I mean a random act. Tell a stranger they look great. Give away something that means something to you. Of course, give away your extra stuff, but I don't think that counts on the healing feel good meter. Give away your lunch to someone really hungry when you can't get to food for a while.

Without sacrifice, there is no sacrifice. God, I sound like a refrigerator magnet. Sorry.  The idea is to gain merit within your own heart. So you get a boost. Most of our morality about generosity is getting rid of our excess. OK, it feels good to clean out your cellar or your attic, but it doesn't overcome the lower side of self-interest.

For those of us who are on the top half of the one percent of the people on the planet economically, educationally, physically, we have a bit of a challenge to get to the bonus karma of sacrifice. I felt good giving a man and kid who had run out of gas all my change the other day. Then I realized I had been annoyed at the weight of the change in my purse. (I got rid of a problem) and the only sacrifice I made was taking the time to hand it to them. Big whip. If I had bought him a tank of gas and a can of oil and some lunch, I would have had to reconsider going out to dinner that night. Even that is a piddling sacrifice.

Mother Theresa, at the beginning of her service in India, would not accept money from people who admired her work. She felt that the donors would only understand the work and get the spiritual benefit from it if they came and worked with her. It was easy for those people to write a check, but Mother Theresa was trying to save the souls of the givers as well as the givees. (new word)

Is this idea a part of the idea that to change the world you have to first change yourself. And part of the current mantra that if you are in distress, you need to work on self care? Is self care really different from going and having a few massages and treating yourself to a movie night? Was it self care for me to live with Emir? How much did my kids sacrifice so I could do what I wanted? Or were my actions simply sharing my quirky character and doing the best I could?

And does doing good really do good? The Dalai Lama blogged the other day that we could pretty much change the world if we greet everyone we encounter with perfect love. I would guess that one of the most universal human needs is to be seen for the wonderful person we are, for our golden heart instead of the strange packaging around it.

The Foster Kids: The Next Installment

Emir brought our the best in people. Neighbors brought food for him because he was so skinny (starved). A bike showed up. Before I could buy him stuff, he had a CD player, cool sunglasses and so on. I think he had an invisible sign on him saying “mother me.” Not so with Francisco. He was small, troubled, and had a dark cloud around him at all times. He would sit with the kids on the deck at night, while the boys were telling and retelling their stories, but he didn't offer much of anything.

From what I heard from the social worker, Francisco was from Nicaragua. His family had been with the Sandanistas during the revolution. When Reagan started his horrible, illegal, immoral, ugly, stupid, Contra War, which Congress refused to fund, Francisco was taken forcibly by the Contras, trained in horrible ways to kill, forced to fight against his own family, and ended up with a head wound and left to die in a pile of dead bodies. He was a child of 13 at the time. Somehow he survived. Somehow he managed to walk to the USA (strange choice when it was the US president who had harmed him), and ended up being found by the Lutherans and sent to us. But he had had no choice except to disappear. He had no other options, being an enemy of both sides.

He went to school and stated to learn English. He was terrified when the police came answering a report from neighbors in Marblehead that Spanish was being spoken late at night on my deck. ( A crime!) And he was petrified when he was stopped by the police while walking home from school and questioned about what he was doing in the neighborhood. And he really didn't like it when my kids and their friends were home from college.

He was acting peculiar, but things got really weird when my daughter's boy friend and his dog stayed with us. Francisco didn't like B. He reported to his social worker that B. was trying to kill him (Not so. If anything was a crime it was that B. hardly noticed that Francisco existed.) Between the time Francisco made the complaint and the time it was to be investigated, all hell broke loose. One night I was cooking dinner and the news was on the TV in the living room. About 7 kids were home. The news on TV was about the Kennedy kid in Florida who had been on trial for rape.

I was checking the news and checking the food, when I heard a silence in the living room. Francisco was holding a knife and telling B. that he was going to kill him. I slipped upstairs and found my youngest daughter and told her to get out of the house and call the police. (phone was visible from the living room). She went from the roof, making no sound. (an activity not alien to her). I returned to the living room and engaged Francisco in an idiotic conversation considering he had a knife to B. throat and a cold, deadly, vacant look in his eyes. (PTSD?) “how was your day at school? Don't you want some food (before you kill B.)?”

Within minutes, soundlessly, through the deck and the upstairs, the police entered the living room and disarmed Francisco before he comprehended that they were there. He went to a psych unit where they determined that he had had a psychotic break. Poor kid , he never did have a fair chance at life.

Then came to social workers investigating whether B. had, in fact, been trying to kill Francisco. Close the barn door after the horse was out kind of activity. Francisco's complaint had been that B. was cutting up pennies with a knife, into tiny pieces, and putting the chips into his food and that the food was killing him by ripping apart his intestines.

Funny thing: there was some reason behind the madness. B. was selling very expensive knife kits and in the scissors demonstration he cut a penny in half to show how sharp it was. We had a parade of investigators come through and question everyone about whether B. had been trying to kill Francisco with the penny chips in his food. Not one person ever investigated the safety of my kids around F. when I had said he was wigging out. He never came back and we never heard from him. Poor kid. Child soldiers are another crime on Reagan's back.

Telling Stories

I really enjoy telling my little stories. I talked before about creating an enchantment. As a Waldorf teacher this was part of the game. One way we taught vocabulary was by using it. I remember telling a fairly tale to a first grade class. I used the word "pellucid" describing the princess's dress. In a Waldorf class, the children retell the story the next day. One of the little darlings, telling the story the next day, with her own details - color, fabric, and so on - used the word "pellucid" and added "shimmering". That word, without any explanation, was now a part of her vocabulary.

When I had my TV show, and no one was around, I gave my whole performance to the camera man. If I could get him interested or hooked, I really started to flow.

I never thought that I could tell stories without seeing the reaction of my audience. I became a pretty good judge of the reaction I was getting and good at jumping to the punch line when necessary and watching people for their involvement. I got bored working on some writing projects because I couldn't get immediate feed back. This Blog thing is so great for story tellers like me. I get immediate reactions. I get told when I am too out of line. (although I am often trying to provoke such a reaction) but mostly I get readers when I hit on a good story and not when I don't. How does that work? Don't they have to read the story to know? Apparently not.

There is a STATS page on blogspot that informs me of how many readers I have and where they live and which of my Blogs they read. I had no idea. Imagine that. When my ten Russian readers dropped out for a bit, I tried to figure out what might interest them. Silly activity, but a lot of fun for the imagination. I have only met a couple of Russians in my whole life. Now I have my real Russians and at the same time, they are only in my imagination. I am fond of them.

And all that is imaginary because a lot of people rout their Internet through other countries. I didn't know that before. I had friends in Nicaragua who couldn't get Netfliks directly from US to Nicaragua, so they routed through Germany or Iceland. So, my Russians might not be Russian. Who knows?

In the old troubadour  tradition, when you told your stories for your room and board, the formula was to get the audience to cry, then to laugh, then to fall asleep. I rather like that, although many of you have not been feasting and drinking in a castle somewhere in Ireland when you read this stuff on your iphones. Maybe the sleep part is out of date.

One of the most remarkable things I am experiencing is our universality. If I am thinking about something, or chewing on something, or remembering something, there are a lot of other people having the same thought at the same time. Do the ideas and stories live in a universe that breaks through to a lot of people at once? Is this writing just giving a chance for stuff out there to pop in for a moment? Are any of our thoughts original or are they deep in the collective unconscious lurking around waiting for their breakthrough? Are those artists who say the book wrote itself speaking the truth?

The years of Musical Beds...Foster Kids

When my oldest daughter and my son were away at school and I was alone at home with my youngest, the house felt very empty all of a sudden. At the same time, I was on the Board of the House of Peace, a Peace Chaplain at the Peace Abbey and a Waldorf teacher. Life just wasn't full enough.
.
At the House of Peace, Ipswich, MA John and Carrie Schuchardt made a home for some handicapped adults and Unaccompanied Minor Political Asylum youth. Basically they were kids who's parents had been killed or were in prison for their political views in other countries. The House of Peace was a fine old 1700s (I think) mansion in an old New England town.

I had the bright idea that in my empty, but small house in Marblehead, MA, USA, I could take some overflow refugee kids. I had to become a certified foster parent, and have my house approved, and then we were in business. The HOP was a non-profit and had a board of directors and fund raisers and all that. I was a struggling single parent teaching school and doing free lance editing into the wee hours of the morning. As usual, I leaped before I looked. I wouldn't trade the experience for anything. I think my kids would have traded it and gotten rid of me at about any point. They would come home from school to find strangers in their rooms, wearing their clothes, riding their bikes and not speaking English. Usual practice in most US homes.

Emir came first. We went to the airport to meet his plane and he we saw him immediately. He had a shaved head, was about 16 years old, had a tee shirt on and a big chest xray around his skinny neck. He was originally from Albania. I never did get the story right, but during the troubles there, his parents were either both killed or one died from disease and the other from the war. Emir had escaped from some massacre as a 14 year old. He had somehow gotten to Yugoslavia and ended up in a prison camp. He was rescued from there and went to Italy to a refugee camp where he was found by the Lutheran Family Services who had been in the business of saving kids for over 100 years.

He had nothing else with him. He only spoke Albanian and the translator never arrived at the airport. We took him home. He was, we discovered, so severely malnourished that for the first few weeks he could only eat rice gruel. Anything else was too rich. His mouth was filled with loose teeth, bleeding gums, abscesses. That night my daughter helped him brush his teeth. The sink was filled with blood. She also showed him how to flush the toilet. He was very frightened when we showed him his little room. Later we learned that he thought it was a punishment to have to sleep alone. He had only ever slept with the whole family in one room.

He slept the night on the floor outside my bedroom door. The next day I had to get him a social security card so he could get to the doctor and dentist on Medicaid. Still no translator. I took him in the car to the social security office in Lynne, MA. We waited a long time in a sad line of sad people. When we walked to the window to get his card, we had our own private Ellis Island experience.

The form was huge; many, many questions. So, we did this charade of the clerk asking me the questions, "Where was your mother born?" and I would turn to Emir and  say in really loud English, "Where was your mother born?" He would look at me like I was fully crazy and say something back to me in Albanian. Probably "What the fuck are you talking about?" And I would turn to the clerk and say any random thing that would come to mind. "Aspirina, Albania". She dutifully filled out the paperwork. We got the magic card.

The day the translator finally showed up, he came with about ten Albanian men. I made a little barbecue in the yard and then they all took off. Emir was so happy to be able to speak. We got almost no translating done because they all just wanted to talk with countrymen. I was cleaning up from the barbecue when the police arrived. Little did I know that this was going to become a very frequent occurrence, each time for a creatively new and different offense.

We lived right by the scenic and filled with expensive yachts, Marblehead, Harbor. Emir and the boys had gone to the harbor and removed their clothes except for their little European briefs and dived into the water and each had picked a different 50 or more foot sailboat to use as their diving platform. Yup. Some different. They actually were so outrageous that they didn't get arrested. The police got the translator to give a talk about private property and KEEP OFF and that's why we have a public beach and you have to get a bathing suit.

Many more Emir stories to come, climaxing with how I came home on Mothers Day to find helicopters overhead and the block cut off by police cars. Emir had stolen a police car (with all the guns in it) to bring me flowers, after he moved out. He never did figure out what all the fuss was. Over time, 31 such kids passed through my house until I cried "uncle".

What Happened to ADD?

When Ron and I were giving talks, he as a pediatrician and I as a teacher, talking about the abuse of the ADD diagnosis and the nightmare of all the mixed up information the poor parents were being bombarded with, I couldn't help feeling sad for both the parents and the kids. I also worked up some anger. I certainly didn't like it that teachers were diagnosing kids, and demanding that the kids be put on Ritalin or they couldn't come to school. I didn't like the story that kids had a different reaction to amphetamines than adults. I hated it that the kids often needed sleeping pills and lost their appetites. And I felt especially sad for those wonderful bouncy, into everything, can't sit still for a minute, best friend with everyone, easily bored kids who were treated as having a deficit instead of a very special gift.

I do understand that there were some extreme cases where some kids were really in need of something, but when half the class was diagnosed, it looked peculiar to me. And I knew very well how amphetamines could make one focus. We discovered that in college. And some friends took a bit too much and had heart attacks and big old problems and got addicted and had big other problems.

I felt the whole epidemic was brought on by a perfect storm of events. Many teachers were failing to engage their students. It is often a disaster when the kids are brighter than their teachers. It is, obviously, a disaster when gym and music and the arts are cut back (so we can fund wars all over the globe). Kids need creativity and activity. Part of the epidemic was the fact that parents were quick to see that if their kid was diagnosed, he got more special attention. Then parents were demanding a diagnosis and the drugs because they thought that more concentration would give their kids an edge, better grades. Probably true in some cases, but really? What were they thinking?

Back in the good old days, when I was in grade school, we had big classes, we did our work, we mostly had good teachers (a middle class family could live decently on a teacher's salary in those good old days), we mostly got good grades. I never remember any kid being held back. I never knew anyone who was sent to the office to be talked at. The first homework I had was a poster in the sixth grade. We played after school. We played with whomever came out to play. God, now it sounds like a fairy tale. (and to top it off, your money earned real interest in the bank) Our parents showed up on parents night and at the Christmas play not every time someone looked cross-eyed at us.

In my opinion, Ron and I lost the battle and lost the war.  The numbers are still increasing, although they West Coast kids and uninsured kids seem to be a lot less likely to have ADD. And what family can live on a teacher's salary? And how many parents can let their kids take some tumbles and lose a few battles and have a few failures anymore? Can the true genius bloom as well if the child is drugged? I don't know the answers.

My friend Greeley would say that it is the food and all the poisons causing the trouble. I have some unfounded prejudice about all the ultrasounds babies endure. Is it remotely natural that all kids have to sit still all day in the same classroom? Are we wired differently from 50 years ago? Is a descriptive anecdotal check-list enough to warrant calling our kids "deficit" kids?

What about other countries? Are they catching us with us? Are kids from other countries just less likely to suffer from mental illness? Or are the parents in other countries just too ignorant and behind the times to recognize the "deficits" in their kids?

Class Reunion

OK, I decided that I would alter my strong 'maybe' to a 'yes' and sign up to attend my 50th boarding school reunion. So far my 'yes' only extends to Saturday day. As it gets closer I might go all out and attend the Saturday evening "cocktail attire" evening extravaganza. I have gotten a little homesick for good old Dana Hall. I have gotten a bit nostalgic thinking that we all actually lived together for three years in our own little ivy tower with an intimacy that we didn't even recognize then.

I have had a bit of history with the school as my mother went there and also my oldest daughter. My mother had very dramatic stories to tell both of the fierce regimentation of the time and of the drama she witnessed. She was in the ivy tower when the stock market crash happened.  Fathers of her friends jumped from buildings on Wall Street. According to Mom, a batch of sad and distraught young ladies were packed off and shipped home a soon as the $ ran out. That was her perception as a youth in a very dramatic time. I am sure the story was not so very simple. And if that sadness is her memory, it is no wonder that she became a social worker.

She told of having to line up before the house mistress and have the length of her bloomers measured. Even in gym class you couldn't show any leg. The bloomer had to meet the stocking. Even though the world as they knew it was ending and the wildness of the Roaring Twenties was coming crashing to an end, Dana girls had to be proper. She also remembered that each girl had a maid behind their chair serving them at the formal dinners. On the other hand, they did the very same, exactly the same, Christmas Revels that we did and then my daughter did twenty six years later, and the same May Day celebration dancing around the May Pole.

Mom was pretty much horrified when she went to my daughter's graduation from Dana and meals were served cafeteria style and you bussed your own silver ware and dumped it in tubs of water to soak. It was the one sign that convinced her that standards had slipped. At the same time she was very impressed with the brightness of the students.

But some things aside from the festivals were enduring. None of us had ever experienced a feeling of being second class because we were women. Our expectations and achievements were never limited because of our sex. I have met more women in the last few years who tell their discomforting stories about how they weren't expected to do much of anything because they were girls. Or who weren't given the chance at a good education, or who were talked to and treated like fluff. My gang came up at the beginning of the feminist revolution. I never had to fight that revolution because I was handed it.

I'm not going because I am a rah-rah gung-ho alum, I am curious to see who we are today. I expect that the acorns were all pretty obvious when we were youth, now to see the oak trees. And a flirt with nostalgia is kind of fun.

MAN, THE BRIDGE BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

Franz Winkler wrote an anthroposophical book by this title. I just had the pleasure of hearing part of a conversation between my friend G. and his old father. G.'s father was falling asleep during the conversation, and he was describing that he was caught in a dream of walking down a garden path. In his dream he didn't know where he was going, but it wasn't really an unpleasant experience.

We know where he is going. From my experience with my parents, I can guess that pretty soon he will see familiar and beloved people in the garden and that will help him be more comfortable going to the other side. My mother saw her mother the week before she died and was so happy she almost jumped out of bed to hug her. Her body could no longer jump but her spirit was very agile.

Once, when my father was laid up, he was resting by a window and the world was deeply covered in snow, he described seeing a lovely doe come to the window and a golden retriever come bounding out and the doe and the dog went happily off through the snow. I asked him what that was about. He replied that he was the dog and my mother was the deer, and she was coming to collect him. Perfect.

I think often we who are not yet there on the bridge between two worlds are the one who would feel more comfortable bringing the dying person back to reality. "No, Sheila, your mother has been dead for years." How could we dare to do that? I think it is an honor and a teaching experience to be in the presence of someone for whom the veil is so thin as to no longer serve as a boundary.

You have to hold onto your hat a bit, because the temptation to let go of our earthly existence is compelling to some of us. But we can do this through meditation and  contemplation, in a conscious act. For the dying person it is a time of transition. Some of us are at ease with transitions, some of us fight them vigorously, both for ourselves and others.

That wonderful, time tested, measure of a true reaction, "What would LOVE do in this situation?" is certainly appropriate at a time like this. LOVE would have to be deeply involved already to give us this good karma.

Missing the Camino

A year ago today Ron and I were walking the Camino de Santiago de Campostella in northern Spain. I have a blog entry (My Camino) detailing the triumphs and terrors of this pilgrimage. When we were coming to the end, I was throwing away my clothes and gear with my usual reckless abandon. I never wanted to walk again. I never wanted to put those boots on, that damned pack on, carry the walking sticks. I thought people who walked it more than once were insane, or unimaginative.

Now, not only am I suffering from nostalgia, but I am looking around for the next big walk. I still don't fully 'get' the distinction between hike, walk, and pilgrimage.  But there is something about well-trodden pilgrimages that remind me that there is some kind of holy reason that millions of people picked that particular route. Ley Lines, Earth Energy, Sanctified Spaces are part of it.

Some portions of the Camino have suffered route changes because of highways and bridges and modern innovations. I swear that I could tell when I was on a deviation because my energy dropped. I felt like I couldn't do it, couldn't walk another step. My sense is that the exchange was temporarily broken. I wasn't getting the juice that sustained me from the earth.

Mentally shopping for the next act, I am simultaneously waiting for the pilgrimage to call me. Right near where I live in Southern Oregon, Mt. Shasta, has an ancient reputation for being very special. I am not thinking of climbing the mountain, but rather walking the Pacific Crest Trail through the area. That presents a huge problem for me. I would have to carry water, tent, food, sleeping bag, snake bite kit. I am thinking of buying a donkey. But they present other challenges.

If you have had a brilliant pilgrimage experience, I would like to hear about it. My legs are twitching and my spirit is yearning.

Friends

My friend Karen, who was born in England and then moved to Germany where her father was involved in reconstruction (?) after WW11, then lived in Southeast Asia and now lives in the USA, once laughed at my unconscious categories of friends. She said that in England you had a 'friend'. I have 'dear friends', 'old friends', 'occasional friends', 'best friends', 'high school friends', neighborhood friends', 'aunties' who aren't really aunts, 'college friends', 'Waldorf friends', 'ex-friends', 'former friends', 'lost or misplaced friends', 'travel friends', 'ship board romance types', 'lovers'... I could go on forever.

I guess when talking about my friends, I like to give them a place in my universe. I never thought of it as grading them, or evaluating them. The adjectives just naturally flowed in my speech. She said it was an odd American thing.

In Nicaragua, I kind of took notice when a taxi driver or someone I had bought tooth paste from would subsequently greet me with a big warm "my friend, Julia". It seems as though the Nicas have one slot for friend and that is someone who has entered their life. I kind of like this. I think face book is bringing this to my world at home. I have been 'friended' by people I don't know, but they are friends of friends and now they are my face book friends.

I see it as a possibility for expansion in my mind. But I also see the chance of the concept of friend becoming so watered down that it is meaningless. To anyone who is really my friend: You are, of course, my best friend.

The Simple Life - Back to the Future

When we lived in the woods of New Hampshire, in a funny little neighborhood ( P. called it "New Jerusalem") populated by pioneer Waldorf School families, mostly teachers' families who had built their own houses into sides of hills, we pretty much all had funky V.W. vans. Getting the kids and teachers to school in our not so very dependable cars, on hilly dirt roads, through the snow and ice, especially the winter of  1977 (is that the one, the one with the back to back blizzards?) was a daily challenge, a daily struggle.

A bunch of the neighbors had horses. I had the fantasy that if we found an old sledge, and an old cart, we could get the kids to school with horses creating much  less hassle and expense than using the cars. It never worked out.

We had created a life that was pretty idyllic for our children. We had gardens, animals, old fashioned toys and games for the children. But we were not living a simple life. Much of the time we were racing around trying to do everything ourselves.

I have already talked about some of the problems encountered previous to this time when many of us tried to live collectively. Not such great outcomes. Those communes which did survive a few winters tended to have either a really nice trust fund behind them or some guy (mostly) who grabbed the 'boss' role and undermined the idea of collective decision making.

Now, in 2012, a lot of my friends have realized that they are racing around from appointment to appointment and are once again yearning for a more simple life. But we also check our iphones a lot. We are racking up many miles in the air visiting the grandchildren, and life, if anything, feels more pressured.

I don't have a car right now. I am in Oregon in the middle of nowhere. I get a tired and heavy feeling when I think of getting a car. Here it goes with the price of gas, the insurance, the upkeep, the guilt about pollution. But without a car, I have to shop at a more expensive food store because I can't walk and carry all the stuff I want. Or, I have to depend on friends for a ride. When I get going on this I wish I lived in a city where there was good public transportation. Very few in the USA qualify. and cities are expensive and I love being in nature. Moan, groan, agony, pain.

What I am trying to figure out is a simple life, but not an old-fashioned one. I want to move into the future without trying to go back to the past. Building on our past we have created this stew we live in. And it seems to me that the USA is a very hard place to change. Leaving the Country might turn out to be my best option. I love the slow pace and human compatibility of life in Nicaragua. I loved seeing the ox cart deliver the 60 inch flat screen TV to the house next door. But, again with the grandchildren and the constant airplanes.

I have done a lot to drastically reduce my consumerism, and in fact, I always hated shopping so this isn't so hard for me. But I am not a homesteader. I am looking for the right mix. Perhaps global warming and the expense of all our wars all over the planet will force some changes. And maybe my generation will man up and get off our own treadmills and use our collective intelligence and resources and change the world. We did it in the sixties. Why not now?

Do We Really Believe in Freedom?

I think Oregon is the straightest place I have ever lived. Strangers actually yell at you for walking outside of the cross walk. There are so many traffic signs that I find it distracting to my driving. Going north on I 5 into Medford, Oregon there is a road sign about every five feet. People are orderly in lines.  They are gung-ho about high school sports. Recycling is a religion.

The first time I landed in Oregon, in 1969, I had moved from Long Island, from Point Lookout, Long Island, next to Long Beach. ( you saw many scenes from Long Beach in the Godfather Part 1) Brown's Lobster House was across the street from our little rental beach house. On certain Sundays, limo after limo would come up to the door of Browns, tinted window and chauffeurs, and dislodge men in dark suits with their hat brims pulled down covering their faces. Three Fingers Brown was supposedly shot during one of these meets. But the neighborhood was very peaceful. The cops were all on the payroll of the Mafia and they protected the neighborhood in their quiet way.

One Sunday, we were hanging around the yard having a beer when these huge heavily armed cops pounded on the door. We looked around frantically wondering what we had done wrong. I opened the door. "Are you Julie Pierce?" one cop growled. I hung my head and muttered "yes."  He reached out his hand and put it on my shoulder, "Well, call your mudder will ya, she's worried about you."

We didn't have a phone, and I guess my mudder really wanted to talk with me. At one point we were going away and I told the guy in the cruiser that we were taking off, thinking we were not that far from New York City, maybe an empty house would seem like an invitation... That cop looked me in the eye and told me, "You don't even have to lock up. Nuttin's going to happen to youse.

So, that neighborhood was pretty strait, with a twist. But the freeways and the stores and anything else around New York were kill or be killed aggression back then. My first day in Drain, Oregon (pop. 600) I walked into the 'supermarket', found a few items and the girl behind the counter looked a bit cross eyed at me and shouted "Hi, honey, how're yooo today." I, with my New York instincts, glanced quickly behind me and grabbed my purse tighter, thinking it was set up for a robbery. She had to be trying to distract me while someone behind was going to mug me. Not so. This was Oregon friendly. Where even today, even if you are in a deep heavy conversation, your waitperson will come up and tell you her name and ask all about your life. Now I just feel like shooting myself and getting it over with.

In Oregon we have very strict rules about dog poop. And we watch our neighbors a lot to make sure they follow these rules. But I am often bothered here by the wildest hypocrisy. These are the same people who cut down all the trees here and don't replant. Fly low over this state someday and your heart will bleed. Some of these fine citizens burned a cross on a friend's lawn a few years back when she married a Jamaican man. Our town of Ashland had a very well attended and very heated City Council meeting discussing the brilliant idea of having an Exclusionary Zone downtown so the tourists wouldn't have to see the poor and homeless. I don't necessarily think it would be a better freedom for your dog to be able to poop everywhere, but I do think that if the logging companies have the freedom to cut your country down to nothing, they should have to pay for their crime as much as a jay-walker, at least.

We need freedom from exploitation of the people and the earth. Freedom is an illusion if it doesn't carry responsibilities. And it is stupid if it only applies to ordinary people and not to corporations.  And if we had democracy, even our strange 'representative democracy' then our elected representatives like George the Second Bush could not, would not, last a day as president, after making his infamous statement "I don't care what the people want, I am the decider."

It is not a simple subject, this freedom stuff.

DISCIPLINE

Not I. No way. Remember, I am the rebel. I march to my own tune. I am, actually an anarchist, but even so, I march to my own tune. I don't like much of what goes on in the name of anarchy, because I am an active pacifist as well. But discipline?

I have been, at times, extremely disciplined. And the cause of the discipline was love. In the course of my life I have become a disciple...under a teacher. Real discipline can not come from fear or threats or anger. Watch the many movies wherein a teacher becomes great by expecting greatness from her students, respecting them with all their foibles, and raising them up to levels of accomplishment no one thought could be attained.

This course of action might start off shakily. Initially both teacher and student are give each other the once over. This is true also with priests, ministers, gurus, trainers. We check them out. Does the tone they sound ring true? Will they stay the course? Who's interest do they have at heart? Do they have something to teach us?

I am talking about 'relationship'. I am talking about 'love' in very wide terms.

One winter in Temple, New Hampshire, pop. 641, between Christmas and Town Meeting (two of the best entertainments in the woods of NH)  my friend S. and I were looking for a big activity. She remembered that there used to be a drama club in town. I had found an original play written by Fritz Day (one of the founders of the Province Town Playhouse in New York) his play was called "Temple is Our Town".

We read the script and couldn't believe that it used to be produced. It had a band, a chorus, horses and stage coach, tons of costumes, cast of hundreds, people suspended by wires falling out of the sky. Our Town had had a huge burst of popularity in the 1800's when lithium springs were found and people came in droves from Boston to take the waters. No matter that the farmer who prospered from this tourism put the lithium salts in his pond. All in good fun.

We decided that Fritz's play was too ambitious. We went to the bank and discovered that the long dormant drama club had some substantial funds that had been sitting for years. Also upstairs in the church attic we found costumes and props. We decided we had to do a play. We chose "You Can't Take it With You" because it was funny and had a huge number of parts. Actually S. chose it.

I decided that I would be the producer and the director. I had never done either, but it was a long dark winter. I needed the challenge. S. took her favorite part. We "rented' the Town Hall. This meant that we hired the guy who came five hours before a rehearsal to start the wood stove. -20 degrees was pretty much average for that time of year, so this was crucial.  Then we set about casting. This mainly consisted of drinking coffee at the Temple Inn and handing out scripts to whomever would take one.

We had the lawyers, the judge, the farmers, the gardeners, the moms, the fire and rescue people, some kids. As the director, I quickly figured out that they all had more experience than I did. I told them to take the part they thought they would do the best at. It quickly sorted itself out. I couldn't believe the choices! How people pictured themselves.

So, as we began to rehearse, I was swept away by how they all figured things out and kind of competed to make the most of their roles. And then others drifted in and started on the sets and costumes, and I just mostly enjoyed myself and told them how great they were and they just kept doing better.

When the show finally went on, we had not just overflowing standing room, but people out in the snow and down the walk way and we had to do extra shows. I was greatly acclaimed as a fabulous director. I learned a lot that winter. I learned how when people are given freedom and recognition, they reach much further than they might have. I learned that many good minds can do so much more than one.

I suppose that sounds different from a teacher facing a hostile class or a new employee starting under a new boss. But I think there is a principle that works for anyone in authority: Expect the best, give your best, respect and utilize that talents each has and then you have a loving relationship. You get your disciples and 'discipline' ceases to be an issue.

Does Your Birth Foretell Your Life?

Year after year, birthday after birthday, I told my kids their birth story. I told the stories in painstaking detail. I described the weather, who was around, the day before, the birth , and the day after. Even when they were in college, I called them and offered the story. I tried to make the telling exactly the same. I wanted them to know.

I had asked my mother about my birth so many times. I was born in 1944, during WW11. My father was in Virginia or Georgia or one of those places, not Asia and not Europe. My mother was living with her parents in Lawrence, MA, USA. Dr. Uniac, who lived across the street delivered me. I came so fast that they never had time to do all the horrible things that were required in those days. Shave the mom, administer an enema, use stirrups, give Scopolomine, otherwise known as Twilight Sleep.

I was born in the caul. That means that the amniotic sack had not been broken. Mummy always said that it must have been so easy on me with all that nice fluid to protect my head. Because in those days they did like to yank the babies out with high forceps.

The story had a twist that always pissed off my mother. Because all those medieval tortures were in the 'standing orders', and because I came so fast, they gave her the drugs after I was born. She said twilight sleep did nothing to ease the pain, it just put your head into nightmare mode.

But it wasn't until I was attending births with Carole Leonard, training to become a midwife, that I saw the expressions and the mood of the different babies as they were born. We were attending home births, almost universally in optimal situations. The clients were educated parents who were happy to be having a baby. They were pretty universally healthy, well fed moms in quiet, softly lit, natural settings. Yet some babies emerged screaming, some with looks of terror on their faces. Others seemed to be smiling, or were so not bothered by the big event that they pretty much slept through it.

I think it is possible that the incarnating being has knowledge of what he/she is about to face in life. Some seem so happy to be born and others, well, it can't be easy. Other explanations don't make much sense to me.

I never did get into the new age thing of re-birthing, maybe because I really had no birth trauma to recollect. Maybe, one birth in this lifetime is good enough.

THEY WILL LAUGH SO HARD AT US SOMEDAY

We think we are so dialed in about our technology, especially cars. I think that it won't be long before our automobile age is the laughing stock of the world. Think about it. To make these huge clunky machines we need natural resources from all over the planet. We mostly use a hundred year- old idea, the internal combustion engine, and materials from all over the planet, and boring repetitive man hours to make ugly, stupid, polluting cars. Then we pave the ground, cut huge monster roadways through wherever, sit for hours at a time, kill each other in accidents, spend shitloads of money on insurance and the cars themselves. When they no longer function, we have mountains of old steel, plastic, batteries, wires, tires, and computer parts to get rid of.

Not to mention the elephant in the room - the fuel needed to accomplish this. So, we go half way around the world to drill deep into the earth, to suck up oil, then pipe it to ports, then use more fuel to ship it around the globe, then pipe it into refineries, then make horrible chemical smog and smut to make it into gasoline, then put it into tankers and take them by rail or truck to gas stations all over the place and then pump it into tanks, and then pump it out of tanks into cars which then burn it to drive the big expensive piece of-soon to be-trash on often busy, overcrowded, ugly roads.

Not to mention my personal worry that if we vacate a layer of ancient earth by removing the oil, don't we leave a vacuum, a gap, a space that will want to settle down - like by an earthquake? Nature abhors a vacuum.

I don't get this. It seems to me that we are using Cro-Magnon thinking to solve the problem of getting around. And the new, energy efficient cars are still going to be a heap of trash soon. I think even the idea of renew, re-use, recycle, is a concept that allows us not to solve problems. There is still the pile of plastic, wires, and batteries at the end of use. Why can't we imagine a world where there is a more elegant, light-filled, healthy, eco-friendly  way to get around? Like psychic projection. You get me. Real, down to earth, practical, conservative, ideas are needed. Conserving the planet and our health: that would be a good idea.

I might have smoked marijuana, but I didn't inhale.

"In this age, anything pretending to be even faintly original (or derivative with any sort of twist), should be considered art."

Thus spoke a reader of this Blog.

I probably agree. I certainly don't disagree.  I was writing about my internal test that I put to works that I might consider art. This comment makes wonder if the reader has another standard for other ages. It also reminded me of an idyllic summer interlude around 1966.

I was married even though P. got out of going to Vietnam because of his injuries from a car accident. Previous to 1965, if you were in college, married or had kids, you didn't get drafted. So among our friends, there was a huge rush to the altar the day after college graduation. Gaps were dangerous.  After that things got complicated. P. was having a rough go. His draft board was in New Haven, CT. The Yale students had scored big on avoiding the draft. Suddenly it wasn't so easy.

The war was already shameful. We already knew about napalm and agent orange and the Big Lies. Earlier on in the war, you could give pretty mild excuses and be given a deferment. It was no longer the case.

For his first appearance at the Draft Board, P. had taken a rather huge amount of amphetamines and gotten his heartbeat so whacked out that they recommended that he go straight to the hospital. He got six months until his next appearance and didn't get to sleep for days.

I might sound flippant when I speak of this. Some of the stories from the time seem like comedy. That was not the case.

There were two room mates from Yale who made a pact at graduation that they would hurt themselves to avoid the war. They went out in their car and picked up a little speed, and one shoved the other out of the car. He broke his shoulder and his arm. No Vietnam. His friend chickened out and got drafted and was killed his third day in SE Asia. Everyday we heard more such stories.

During the six month reprieve, we ended up hitch hiking from Portland, Oregon to San Francisco to join in the Summer of Love in Haight Ashbury. That's a long story for another day. We were in a terrible smash up right outside of San Francisco. P.'s head was smashed, his hip crushed, and more.

His father came to bring him home to Oregon and had to charter a plane to take him because no public transportation would let him on board. The draft from Connecticut arranged to have someone check him out in the hospital in Oregon because they didn't believe his story. He got out of the draft for good.

We got married anyway. And the summer after we were married we were in a rented farm in Pennsylvania having a bit of fun. There was a little bit of acid around and a tiny bit of hashish, and maybe a little bit of wine and certainly our room mate, Peter Fish, had a few martinis that summer.

We each had an art project going. Mine was my sun tan. I got a perfection never before and never since matched.

Peter was a handsome guy who looked like a cross between Jason Robarts and Franklin Roosevelt. He wore his Brooks Brothers striped shirt and bow tie. He had a huge old typewriter on a little wooden table under an apple tree in the orchard. He was working on The Great American Novel. He wrote like a maniac and laughed and read it aloud, and as each page was finished, he threw it up in the air and let it be carried off in the wind.

P. was making a huge sculpture. He had erected a mind boggling substructure of wood and chicken wire. He had deliveries made of copies of the Congressional Record. (there was some profound significance...you can guess) and was making a papier mache form over the chicken wire with flour, water and the paper. Every time it rained, his work was washed out.

I am pretty sure all three of us were making 'art'. None of our creations even began to withstand the test of time. Is it 'art' if the creator calls it such?

IS IT REALLY ART?

I love this discussion. It can get almost as heated as a good political discussion. No, I can almost rate it as better than a good political discussion because these days, a good political discussion is hard to find - in my world that is. Either people are too afraid, too ignorant or too entrenched in their righteousness to discuss politics. (I, for one, have never been guilty of this!)

But the question of whether something is really 'art' can be a lot of fun. I am going to use painting as my example. We all know that most art was religious for almost forever. Scan backwards mentally from cave paintings to 'primitive' masks, to pyramid paintings to Greek gods, to Renaissance Catholic paintings..the whole shooting match. I tend to think the greatest art came before the masses caught up with what was going on. I think the art was leading the way to changes in consciousness.

Now in the US we don't have a standard measure, a pope, or pharaoh to cast his approval and demands. We have the marketplace. Somehow appropriate to this time in history. That being said, I think that art should add something to what is already mine. If a painter makes a painting, it needs to give me a new or deeper way of perceiving. For me to call it 'art' it has to have a add on. It has to lead me to more than I have already. And it has to be something I could see anew. Inspiration. Breath of the Gods.

The rest of the stuff I see and certainly the stuff I have painted, falls into the category of crafts or decorative stuff or art school project. No problem with that. My theory is that you know real art when you meet it. It makes sense that the marketplace is the judge today. Perfect sense. And some people are ahead of the rest of us in the department of recognizing what is coming and what is enduring. And I suppose "I hate that work" is as good a measure as "I love that work."

I get very uncomfortable viewing "Guernica". I dislike that painting. But, I can not mistake the power in it. What do you consider art? Is seeing new stuff uncomfortable for you? Do you trust the marketplace? Can you read the history of consciousness through art? Can you feel the presence of genius in some work, even a truly disturbed genius? Is the disturbed, messed up hand necessary to break from convention and point us to the future? A lot of artist friends think my thinking is immature on this subject. It could be. Quien sabe?

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

This is one of my rants. I would love for my theory to be proven wrong, but so far, I am pretty much dead on right. (good for my ego, bad for all of us)

"Love is blind". I think a little of blindness is necessary at the falling in love stage. In this theory I am mostly talking about second chance romances and not so young people looking for the right partner. This is a huge population in US society now. My theory is that many people are evaluating the 'relationship' from the moment of the first meeting. They are looking for and evaluating everything. The expectations in a partner are humongous. Too huge for mortals to fulfill.

The 'other' seems to need to be; best friend, soul mate, lawyer, shrink, spiritual adviser, support in whatever I want, care taker, income generator, teacher, lover, playmate, coach, fashion consultant, dreamer, financial consultant, 'there for me', loyal, 'mine', minister, all of the above and more I can't fathom.

I think of my parents. By the time sixty something years had passed in their marriage, they were all of these things for each other, but they still had others who filled these roles. When they first encountered, they fell for each other across the room in a first class at grad school. Their backgrounds were entirely different. Different religion, different heritage, big family vs small family, but the blindness of love brought them together. They grew together. They had five kids, careers, good times and bad times.

My mother was entirely a beach person. My father didn't know how to swim. They sorted it out. They didn't start with the check list for a perfect partnership and eliminate each other because of the of short comings they would have perceived.

I know a lot of mistakes were made in the good old days and there were plenty of miserable marriages, but there were also  lot of good solid families. God, I sound so old fashioned. I am trying to get to the notion that without the early fabulous falling in love, if they had used the relationship check list it never would have had a chance. The big love, the blind love, the goofy infatuation, gives people a lot to fall back on when times get hard.

You develop lenses that see the good in each other. They are the same lenses that we develop when we have a baby. No matter how that baby looks or acts, we find it all adorable, perfect, exciting, the one and only on the whole planet in all history, and thank goodness for that because we have to see with those eyes no matter what comes.

I think this is a pretty romantic viewpoint. I think it is filled with flaws and loopholes. I also see so many young people waiting, looking, being critical of themselves and others, getting hungry for a partner and knowing what they want, but not being willing to take a chance. Getting that "If I only had the right woman, man " vibe going. Bad vibe that.

In our society we don't like risk. We don't like to fail. Parents go through contortions to keep their kids for failing. Everyone on the team gets a ribbon, everyone in the parade gets a 'best costume', everyone at Harvard gets an 'A' in every course.

Some of the best romances in all history failed. But, what passion, what excitement!

There is also something to be said about the energetic interchange. If we look at anyone and see the best in them, they act and react with their best. If we look critically, seeing all their flaws, we somehow activate the negative in the other.

In the Buddhist teachings (I have talked about this in other contexts) we say that if you want something, give away what you want. If you want support, be supportive. Don't demand support. It doesn't work that way. If you want love, be loving. If you want peace, be peaceful. I am trying. I have not mastered anything. That is why I can be such a wonderful "wounded healer".

I wonder how this resonates with you, dear reader. I wonder whether you have had the big love and whether it has turned into a real partnership. I wonder if there was a moment when that commitment became for real through thick and thin, for better or for worse. Let us hear your story.

What is Real?

"THE VICTOR: Man is spirit--this is all man needs to know; and spirit is triumphant over matter."
White Eagle, The Quiet Mind

Another past life flashback: The details of this story are a little fuzzy around the edges, but the gist is clear.

Some of my favorite books as a young girl were the Louisa May Alcott classics. I read and re-read Little Woman, Jo's Boys, All of them. I was all of the characters. I knew all of the characters in real life. I guess that is one thing that makes a classic.

Later I got politically excited by Thoreau, but never warmed to his as a person. Emerson's poetry wasn't for me (I loved Whitman), but Emerson's essays had that perfect blend of intellectual, rebellion and something different.

The 'different' was the idea of the direct connection to the spirit. I encountered Emerson at the same time I was meeting Eastern Religions and philosophies. I couldn't get enough. And even in those days of the early sixties, ante-internet, all the original sources were readily available to me. When Emerson and Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller and Channing, and the original members of the Concord School of Philosophy met in the barn behind the Alcott house, the meeting of East and West was rather profoundly revolutionary, and Transcendentalism was born.

Meeting the work of Rudolf Steiner and having the opportunity to know John Gardner and Francis Edmunds and even walk Walden Pond with them and my father, brought me closer and closer to understanding that I was a Transcendentalist.

Louisa' story, Sewing our Transcendental Wild Oats, was the story of the disaster at Fruitlands. The transcendentalists, joined by some utopian Europeans, decided to make a self-sustaining community, with perfect lofty communal ideals, growing all their own food, bringing together thee best minds and so on. Certainly a precurser to the communes of the sixties.

Emerson abstained. He couldn't see it working. They did it without him. A whole group of families and single men made their utopian farm and were it not for the generosity of  Emerson, they would have starved to death the very first winter. It sounds like instead of harvesting the grain on the right days, they were involved in deep discussions about philosophy.

Emerson's brilliant comment which I remembered many times in the sixties was 'If one man can't get his practical life in order, then how could it possibly work better to have ten or a hundred of such men doing the same together?' (that is a paraphrase)

So, one day I was living in southern New Hampshire and a friend from Emerson College was coming to his Groton School reunion. I was picking him up at his mother-in-law's house and then bringing him to NH for a visit. I got lost in the woodsy suburbs. Finally finding her house, near Concord, I arrived earlier than my friend. I went out for a walk and had a total strange out of body experience. I was seeing the history of the land that I was walking on.

Returning to the house, I asked the woman, "Where am I?' she kept telling me the address and saying it was the right house. "No, Where is this?"  I persisted. Finally she gave me a look, and said "This whole suburb was once, for a short time, a community called Fruitlands and they chose this land because it had been sacred to the Indians who previously inhabited it. I almost started to cry. I had certainly been there before.

Sometimes I meet new people and have the flash "Transcendentalist. Happy to see you again after all this time."

I would suppose this is a fairly common experience. You?