Let
We make no difference.
4
The Crone Evolution.
These are my two grandmothers in the mid-1940s, when they were a few years younger than I am now.
That’s my mother’s mother on the left — the small, straight-backed, serious woman — the one who saved my life with her Old World medicine magic (see poem below).
My father’s mother is bigger, softer-looking, but was no less strong. She remembered growing up in Sklody, Poland, admiring her third cousin, who became the famous Madame Marie Curie. Strong women, all.
But how old they look to me now, even though, today, I am older than they are in that photo. Life was hard for them — very serious business, with five kids each and hard-working blue-collared husbands. They cooked well, cleaned well, and passed along to me their matriarchal genes — the blessings and curse of my crone heritage.
On this day of memory, I remember my grandmothers.
HEART OF ROM
Cyganka! My grandmother shouted
as I bounded off the front stoop
onto the wet city street,
propelled by the promise of stolen kisses
and the musky taste of Tangee
still slick on my lips.
Gypsy! Even the word
brought blood rushing
to the pit of my stomach.
How I wished for the wild hair,
dark eyes, skin like old copper,
for the freedom to gleam
like crystal when I walk,
for a wisdom ancient as the land,
as the sweep of continents,
the shriek of willful wind
through openings in stones.
Cyganka! She hurled it
like an epithet,
but I role it like a broom
over landscapes grown deaf to her fears.
She named me true, my Polish grandmother
— a small strong-handed woman
with gypsy fire in her voice
and a back turned straight
against truths too bold to hold.
Yet, they tell me once,
as I lay young and dying
lungs rattling with rifts of air,
fever lighting my face to flame,
(the doctor came and went,
scowling at the earth) —
in the draped and stifling room,
she unfolded her family secrets:
holy candles, crystal cups,
vials of spirits, leeches, as
my mother watched from shadow,
willing demons away with her eyes.
They tell me when the priest arrived,
surprised to find the child alive,
he never commended on the faint red circles
following the tender length of spine,
or the sprinkling of blood marks
along the back, like the bites
of mythic bats or the denounced
touches of wizened old wives.
And so I keep signs
of these grandmothers, still
–in fragrant herbs sprinkled in tea,
in shells and stones arranged on shelves,
in faint red circles, drawn in firelight.
Cyganka! I call to my daughter,
offering gifts of crystals
that fire the sky
where she walks.
(copyright EF 1980)
Whose Truth?
The other evening I went to an event held to give some visibility to the Glass Lake Studio (Expressive Arts Therapy Program) and to bid farewell to its founder and his wife, who are moving to Canada to join a community led by “guru” John de Ruiter.
According to de Ruiter’s site,
Canadian born John de Ruiter responds to invitations World-wide, addressing audiences from “core splitting honesty” and his unconditional way of absolute surrender and servitude to Truth.
Because I steer clear of anyone who spells Truth with a capital “T” (and run fast in the other direction from concepts like “surrender” and “servitude”), I am always a little taken aback when people who have been among my circle of friends go off to embrace such Truth so blissfully and assuredly. With the de Ruiter Truth, it’s not just the couple to whom I recently wished “safe journey.” Another couple I know — both well-trained psychologists with successful practices — have already moved, at least temporarily, north to de Ruiter’s Canadian enclave.
Without a doubt, truth is very important. Look at the mess the world is in because so many of our leaders have forgotten how to tell it. It’s interesting that de Ruiter’s wife recently left him because he is sleeping with two of his lovely blonde followers. I think that he has some sort of rationalization of the difference between his own “personal truth” (small “t”) and Ultimate Truth (capital “T”).
Heh.
It all makes me stop to think about how many ways of defining “truth” there are out there. There’s scientific truth, historical truth, personal truth, mythic truth. And then there’s the capital “T” Truth, the idea of which always seems so compelling. It also tends to be the idea behind many of the most gruesome murdering sprees of mankind, from the Crusades to the war on terrorism.
Scientific truths change and evolve as new information is added to the mix. Historical truths often are a combination of actual facts colored by personal truths. It’s all so messy, so chaotic, so lacking in surety — kind of like life. To believe or not to believe. We make our choices and we take our chances.
Personally, my choice for truth usually is to try to match up my personal truths with the kinds of mythic ones that Joseph Campbell so eloquently and artfully described and analyzed in his too-soon-forgotten series of PBS programs and books. I guess it’s my way of integrating the big picture with the little picture, the personal with the planetary. Because, for me, it’s the only way for me to arrive at truths that I can count on, that provides the loom on which I can weave that chaos of science and history and personalities into the fabric of a life that I can wrap around myself for safety and sustenance.
All the rest is someone else’s truth. Someone else’s Truth.
That’s why the current American intrusion into the Middle East is so confusing to most people. (Makes you want to run way and hide in the bosom of de Ruiter Truth, doesn’t it?)
To help you get at some of the truths about Middle East Truths, you might want to link over to Bob Harris’ post on here , which begins:
It may be anything from a play for leverage in Iraq to the opening drumbeat for another war, but the White House, Rumsfeld, and Blair have all gotten on Iran’s case for allegedly harboring Al-Qaeda suspects, which supposedly even led to this week’s increased terror warning.
Iran denies the charge.
Who’s telling the truth? I don’t know. But keep reading.
It’s well-worth reading.
And to get a better fix on the continuing un-truths being thrown at us by the Bushies, check out Peter Beinart’s article in The New Republic Online that spells out “the record over the last eight months.”
Whose truth. Yes, indeed.
The Propaganda Dilemma
Watching CBS
never enough Elmo
Since the terry-cloth “Elmo-head” pillow (with detachable arms) — pictured above — that I created was such a hit with my 9-month old grandson, I decided to design and crochet a Baby-Elmo hand puppet.
It came out so good that I’m attempting a Winnie-the-Pooh one.
Retirement, combined with caregiving, leaves lots of time for extreme dillitantism and a need to do something to keep my hands out of the potato chip bag.
Smart Presidential Campaigning
More why I like Howard Dean
In an interview with the online magazine Truthout, Howard Dean today discusses his views on the Patriot Act and the media. In Grist magazine, he shares his concerns about the environment and his anger at President Bush’s energy and environmental failures. Finally, an Associated Press article about his successful online fundraising highlights that Dean “hit the $1 million mark in Internet fund raising last week, becoming the first 2004 presidential hopeful to announce he has done so.”
To read the Truthout interview, click here.
To read the Grist interview, click here.
To read the AP article, click here.
And speaking of the opposition to the Patriot Act, b!X tells me that the Common Council here in Albany NY has passed a resolution opposing it. Sure enough here’s the link I found.
The Evil, Risen
I taped the CBS miniseries The Rise of Evil so that my mother and I can watch it with the commercials fast-forwarded. (Maybe that way she’ll stay awake.) But non-blogger ‘myrln’ did watch it, and this is what he has to say about it:
To those who didn’t see the Hitler mini-series, I say, Too bad. Were I a blogger, I would say to all who didn’t, Why not? Too much like ancient history? Well, that plays right into the hands of Dumbya and Gang. The fact is, CBS deserved support for getting this program done and on the air, but it couldn’t attract major advertisers and settled for PSAs and mail order ads mostly. Business, I guess, didn’t want to risk offending Zionists who condemned the program (tho’ major Jewish leaders who previewed it gave it the highest praise), or didn’t want to risk offending the current administration(?).
Anyone who didn’t see it but cares and knows history can/does repeat itself needs to buy/rent it when it’s released into general distribution. Why? Because while it’s not directly analogous to 2003 America, it’s familiar enough to be unnerving. How? Let me
count the ways.
— Hitler’s relentless drive to consolidate the power in the Chancellor while at the same time usurping congressional (Reichstag) powers.
— Reluctance of media to report on Brown-shirt thuggery for fear of offending Hitler. As one reporter/editor says, “No one wants to read about anything they could do something about. It’s as if we’ve gone stupid or blind.” (Seem familiar?) And when he does get something in print, his home and wife are threatened, the paper smoke-bombed, and eventually, he is taken into “protective custody” and ultimately sent to the early camps, one of the first at Dachau, where he is finally killed. His wife is never told of his death, only receives a package with his bloodied, broken glasses.
— Movie news (’30s equivalent of tv news) becomes rah-rah propaganda for Hitler and the National Socialist Party (Nazis). (Sound familiar?)
— His subversion of democratic process to empower his party and move toward chancellorship by having his party consistently walk out of Reichstag and thus force new elections. (Well…that sounds like Texas.)
— Then he secretly orders the Reichstag building burned and afterward claims, “The terorists have opened fire, and we will fire back.” (Sound familiar??)
— To fight the alleged terrorists, he engineers new procedures: all legislative matters will be handled by the administration as well as communications etc. under what he called the Enabling Act. “Any refusal to go along would be regarded as opposition,” he said, making clear the implication that “opposition” was equivalent of terrorism or treason. (Sound familiar?)
The final impression was one of Nazi Germany’s echoes in history becoming voices again in our current age in our own country. Not exact parallels, as I said, but so unnervingly familiar. Right down to when he’s take full control of the country and the final moments of “Deutschland Uber Alles” filling the air over pictures Krystalnacht, and the camps, and of bodies from the camps stacked like cordwood (those same ones I saw in movietone news after WWII ended). Somehow, I heard simultaneously in my head the almost ubiquitous “God Bless America” just under the other melody.
All too close for comfort. CBS deserves a medal, or at least praise, for doing the miniseries.
I notice that lots of people are reluctant to make the comparison between Hitler and Bush. But, isn’t it obvious???
Out of the Box and into the Garden.
The Gravity of Gardens (May 2002)
They gave me a garden
the size of a grave,
so I filled it with raucous
reminders of sense:
marigold nests,
nasturtium fountains,
explosions of parsley, and
riots of lavender —
forests of tomato plants
asserting lush ascendance
over scent-full beds of
rosemary, basil, and sage.
And waving madly above them all,
stalks of perplexing
Jerusalem artichoke,
that unkillable weed
that blossoms and burrows
and grows up to nine feet tall,
defying the grim arrogance
of gravity.
Gardening the Grave (May 2003)
Four stakes,
two tomato plants
(so far),
last year
A Day Out of the Box #3
The fabric of our lives.
Yesterday
I sent a package
to my second cousin,
stationed in Iraq
A Day Out of the Box. #2
One assignment at the poetry workshop led by Joan Murray and held at the Still Point Retreat Center was to write a poem that dealt with fear.
An old story
Another noiseless night,
and, again, the ambulance
waits below her window,
its strobe striping red
through the slats
of her closed blinds.
She listens for whispers
from the long hallway,
some hint of who it is
this time —
maybe the frowning one
who drifts, slow in motion,
beside her grizzled
three-legged dog;
maybe that sweet sad man
who wheels himself each day at three
into the patch of sun at the front door;
or maybe someone still
faceless and frightened
keeping silent vigil
until three a.m.
(copyright EF 2003)