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Human Nation News

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It’s been a rough few years, and this past year has been the roughest yet in many ways. But it never has been easy, as Betony says in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. Life isn’t easy, and nature is often brutal, pitiless. Humans make it harder than it has to be most of the time, though.

I’ve been thinking about doing Human Nation News (HNN) since 2003 or 2004, but I guess it needed to stew a bit. The idea was basically that we are all here on this One Planet, in the vast cavernous space around us, and we have come to the point where we must recognize we are One People. The Human Nation. The purpose was to write about this nation, focusing on our commonalities through story. To connect us through the stories of people everywhere.

This was way too broad, though–made even more broad when I set up the fraternal-twin websites of Handmade Shoes and HNN. Gestating in the same womb, but each from its own zygote. Handmade Shoes is soul musing, a journal, a place for dreams and for sorting through my life and finding my way. HNN is more outward-facing but still firmly planted in soul soil. I’ve been dabbling in here for a few years, testing the waters and allowing myself space free from others’ eyes for the most part. Things do need darkness to grow sometimes. Even the trees, who love the sun, will tell you that.

Back in the early 2000s when I went deep into the darkness of my own mind and soul, propelled by the accumulated and ongoing insults of life with humans, I also went into the woods. Nature, who offered me succor and magic all through my childhood, once again became prominent in my daily life, and as I walked outside with my dogs (first Heidi, now Lucy) daily around the neighborhood and every weekend at Thacher State Park, I became friends with the beings we encountered. One tree in particular, an old maple at Thacher, became a “someone” to me, and I greeted her with joy each time we passed by. Over the years I would often stop and talk to this great being, and when I was feeling utterly lost I would come right up to her and wrap my arms around her and cry, letting out all the poison.

This tree did not mind. In fact, I felt that she appreciated my attention and talking and even tears. Until, after many years of greeting this being and talking to her and loving her, I was once again in a very dark place (I know the dark places well) when I visited her. I put my hands on her trunk and my forehead too, and said, “I feel so bad,” and felt that badness all through me, in all its possible meanings, from all the accumulated and ongoing insults of living with humans and being a human. The tree, this magnificent old being, took me down deep into her roots, into the darkness where the creatures of the dark live and never see the light. There she told me not to be ashamed of the darkness. She told me darkness feeds Life.

Over all these years wandering in the woods I have come to understand that the Human Nation is one among many other nations Here on Earth–which goes against my indoctrination, which says humans are the ones that matter on this planet, we are the smartest, we are the conscious ones, the most important ones. We alone of all living beings have Soul, and all the other beings on Earth are for our use. Our use.

Except we treat “other” humans as though they were expendable/beneath notice and, often, as though they are there for our use. To make profit off them. Within our own groups, even the smallest groups, we treat certain members as though they do not matter as much as other members, effectively rubbing them out.

Human history is very dark, filled with brutality that has its source in a concept of power as physical (and physical wealth is an extension of physical power). The atrocities that have been carried out upon our own species in the quest for power have never been adequately healed because the victims have been obliged to get back in the game or perish: a game whose rules are defined by those who have managed to grab power over others. Unresolved trauma gets passed through the generations, leading to perpetuation of brutality through retribution and acting out patterns of abuse upon those who are physically and economically weaker.

But something has been happening. The darkness has been coming up to be acknowledged and healed, in my personal life and in the world. Concurrently, a reemergence of the consciousness of our interrelatedness with one another and all of life on Earth has been gaining clarity and force–connecting direct back to the true source of power: the place where we all ultimately connect.

Now, after all these years, I’ve decided that Human Nation News is to be an exploration of the re-emerging consciousness that we are all interconnected–not only all humanity but all living beings. This includes the compassionate observation of what comes up to be healed and let go as we dismantle the old physical power paradigm and embrace the life-giving power that resides within each of us. It is also a battle cry in the eternal War of Love, sending dispatches out to humanity in the name of all life Here on Earth. Calling to all who feel their innate value and who understand that each human possesses this innate value regardless of their position in the current crumbling hierarchies. Calling to all who, conscious of their own innate value as living beings, also recognize the innate value of all living beings.

Escarpment Trail, Catskills, 42.20004, -74.05873 to trail head. June 2019.



Rocks

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In Memoriam.

“Rocks” is a reference to the Jewish custom of leaving rocks on someone’s grave, in remembrance. “Rocks” is a place to re-member those whom I have loved or admired, or who have done good service in Thee Old Cause. (I am not Jewish, although I feel an affinity with Jews and if I had to choose a religion I would be a Jewish atheist.) I first learned of this custom from the movie, Schindler’s List, in which the survivors and their families lined up to place rocks on Schindler’s grave. It has always stuck with me.

Today, on the hunter’s moon, October 2018, I’d like to remember my professor, Arthur Clements. I took a course with him in fall 1993 that wrapped together Medicine, the New Physics, Mysticism, Poetry, and damn–D.H. Lawrence! I’d never read Lawrence before, and we didn’t read Lady Chatterley’s Lover either. We read The Man Who Died. It was a great class. He was both fierce and compassionate–if you didn’t read the material, he might kick you out of class, but if you did he would listen to you, even if you said strange things, and take you seriously. I contacted Art in 2003 because I was writing again, and we talked a few times on the phone. He was dying of cancer then. In the spring of 2004 I got an email from his companion–that is what he called her, which seemed to me both cozy and maybe a little distancing for a lover–asking me if I would be willing to speak at his memorial, that he had wondered if I would in his last days. So I wrote the following piece and drove to Binghamton, where I stood, and shook, and read. One last lesson.

Art and Life

I took one of Arthur Clements’ classes in the fall of 1993, my second semester at Binghamton University. It was not an easy class, and I regard it as formative. I am still learning the lessons he laid out for us then, for, as so often happens with a good teacher, I understood what he was talking about while there, in his class and steeped in the material, but it has taken me years to apply it. I am still weaving it in, and I suppose I always will be—because the subject Art concerned himself with was far more than academic; it was Life.

Allow me to give you an example. Our final paper was to be 16 to 20 pages, discussing the works of Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and Galway Kinnell. We were to “find a theme tying them together—what is common, what is distinctive, and how they distinctively express what they have in common.” A difficult task indeed—one which I worked very hard to fulfill. On the last day of class, before we handed our papers in, Art told us we had a choice: we could tell him not to count our paper, in which case he would automatically give it an A, or we could tell him to make it count, in which case we took our chances on the grade it received. I still remember the mingled fear and hope of that moment when I gave up a guaranteed A in favor of an honest appraisal of my work.

This is what I am grateful for—he took pains to elicit the very experience of being awake and alive that we were studying in these authors. He tried to show us that every moment we have a choice to either make ourselves comfortable or take the opportunity to push our boundaries, defy convention, give up the standard measures of success. “The object,” he once told us, “is to live intensely, feel intensely, love intensely—happiness is not a state of constant comfort and ease of soul.”

It is therefore with conviction that I can say to those who are feeling pain in the wake of Art’s passing: he would want you to embrace that pain and see it for the gift it is—another opportunity to experience the fullness of life, here and now.

April 2004

Arthur Clements

“This is a subtle truth: Whatever you love, you are.” ~Rumi

In the Gym

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It all started when I met Walt Whitman in the gym. I was stretching my legs and had been for some time when he spoke. “Looks as though those legs of yours could do just about anything, now.” He was right. I’d been stretching like I was going to run a marathon, but here I was, all alone in this gym, with an old man watching me and making comments. “Why aren’t you out doing a poetry reading or something?” I asked him, and he said he was tired of people complaining when he put pauses where they didn’t want them. He said it was his poetry, so he could read it like sweaters falling off of hangers if he wanted, right? Then he looked around with an air of resignation and said that maybe he wasn’t in the right business. Maybe he should be a guidance counselor instead.

<!–My middle school gym, in fact. The very worst possible gym.–>

This was a dream I had after transcribing everything I’d ever written (that I still had) into what turned out to be a 500-page Word document.  The transcribing was actually a very good exercise: it taught me that even though I thought I quit writing I actually had been writing all along–only in the form of letters, dreams, papers (for the English degree), and fits and starts, constipated-but-earnest bits in many notebooks over the years. I was no George Eliot, but I was a writer.

These were good things to learn. The problem was, I started to think that this 500-page monster in a box (<3) was actually a book. A publishable book. It’s a dear document to me, and has many seeds and even flowerings, but god help the person who delves there alone and unaided by my memories and personal interest.

Besides letting me know he was a bit exasperated with me, what ol’ Walt was saying was, I had long been ready to go out and actually write. On purpose. In the open. Making time for it and not letting anyone or anything interfere with that time. Not bitchy (unless necessary)–just protective. I kept stretching my legs though, thinking about writing but not doing it. Immersing myself in snippets but never making them into anything.

And you know, that’s OK. I could enjoy my writing as a little hobby I dabble in but never get too serious about, and the absence of my voice would not make the Universe cease. Living life well and having loving interactions with people: cooking good food, drinking wine, enjoying a movie or a play or a concert, taking care of business, and going on this way day after day, year after year–these are all very good things and a life thus lived is a good life. But I’ve fought  through isolation that was some times impenetrable by humans, most times no human wanted to penetrate. Time spent unable to connect in a meaningful way with anyone in my life. Luckily, I found connection through other aspects of life: nature, animals, stories, poems, music, movies, art…

The marks left by others have saved me, and because I desire to communicate my experiences and see how they fit in with the larger picture –into life and humanity and what we’re doing here– I feel the responsibility to leave marks, too. Just in case these words bring even one person succor or light or direction or any of the numberless ways we humans make meaning to sustain ourselves on the journey.

∞ ∞ ∞

Walt Whitman saved me, right at the point where all the work I’d been doing underground was ready to come out and show its pale green face to the sun.

I was a 22-year-old mother, grocery cashier, wife of a warehouse worker barely getting by in a cheap, cat-piss smelling apartment when I saw Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. Robin Williams was funny–a lovably and even adorably clueless Mork–but in DPS he became this teacher who had honey on his tongue and made you want to truly find out what it is to live your life. I believed him, and every bit of that movie. Afterward, I thought I remembered we had a book of Whitman on the shelf, went to look and found it. When I took it out the binding opened to “On the Beach at Night Alone,” and I stood there reading it, transfixed. It is very difficult to tell you what that did to me, reading it the first time, without telling you a whole lot of other things too. So I’ll have to suffice with…it validated a view of the world I’d experienced, but before that moment almost nowhere else had I found evidence others had also experienced it that way. I’d lucked across a paragraph or so in a Carl Jung book, but other than that, I knew nothing yet of the vast and rich conversation that has been going on for 30,000 years give or take a few.

Whitman was my constant companion from then on, for at least six months. I took him everywhere–even in my pocket at work, to be pulled out for every ten-minute break. My fear–the ever-present social phobia–subsided for the time. This all started in April, and the following January I was registering for classes at Broome Community College–standing on that gym floor covered in blue-taped lines and arrows, a voice in my head telling me the fuck up, me the mental patient, me the ragamuffin delinquent daughter I should leave before I throw up. Then one of my soon-to-be professors came up to me and looked at the classes I wanted.

Transformations of Myth Through Time

The class he thought he was teaching.

He said, “I think I’m teaching that one,” pointing to a class listed on the paper, which was just weird enough to jolt me out of my fear, and then he showed me the line I needed. I got through, got my classes, and didn’t throw up even once. Turns out literature, not psychology, was what I needed. Stories and poems, myths, and my professors up there, leading the conversation. I loved the conversation, hungered for it, and semester by semester came back to humanity–my own and the human spirit that contains all.

So Whitman, and Robin Williams, saved my life. Along with a whole lot of others who decided to tell their stories when they could easily have kept them to themselves.

Now, since October or so, I’ve shyly been voyaging out, writing in the open. Put something out there, then run and hide. Put something out there again, run and hide. But it’s OK. It’s OK to take it slow, I tell myself, stretching some more. I’m figuring this out.

Because

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You can start anywhere, and there will still be stuff before that, just as pertinent to the story you want to tell. But you have to start somewhere, so a good recipe.

I’m supposed to have a game plan, a clear picture of where this is going, but honestly, the idea started in 2004, and if I don’t start I never will–so I’m just going to start.

We live in very interesting times. Can I quote William Blake so early without being judged pretentious? “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” And, oh yes, we are all the best and the worst.

What I envision is a bit of salve–healing the worst and encouraging the best in whoever it may. But it may not, and that is OK too. I just know that if I don’t write about the stuff I’m thinking I feel like I’m surviving, and if I do I feel like I’m in love.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

To outline the idea of Human Nation News, basic premises:

  • We’ve outgrown the us-them thing, and we need to think of all humans as part of the same group. We’re out here in space, on a planet we’ve nearly made uninhabitable for this number of people in the future, and we need to recognize we are one. Or not. But if we don’t and we continue on this path we’re on….it ain’t gonna be pretty.
  • Most of us know this at some level, but think we’re a minority, or that for one of a few reasons it’s impossible to change what has developed over centuries: it’s like turning the Titanic. But I believe we can turn on a dime, like schools of fishes or flocks of birds.
  • In fact, we are a majority.
  • I believe in the power of words, music, art, and the stories we tell to nourish the best in us, and also to feed the worst in us. We are given too much feed, and I intend to nourish.

Good night, and good luck.
(But as a professor I know says, make your own luck.)