Grieving

I spent the weekend before the Charleston church shooting in Providence, Rhode Island, attending a grief workshop facilitated by Carolyn Baker. Carolyn led us in a ritual in the West African tradition of Malidoma and Subonfu Some.

My beautiful teacher, Carolyn Baker.

One way Carolyn readied us for grieving was to tell us folktales while drumming. She usually began with something like "a long time ago or a short time ago or whatever time it was." Right away, because I couldn't place the story in time, I--I'll speak only for myself--could disengage some other habitual expectations. Where was it taking place? I didn't need to know. If a dead father walked into a village, weren't there dead fathers everywhere? Villages everywhere? If a long-delayed tear was shed by a man and drunk by a woman, couldn't that happen in my town, and wouldn't my town be changed by it?

With the drumming serving as a sort of universal pulse, I could have been sitting anywhere in the world or living in any time. I could accept that caring for an ancestor required picking the maggots off one side of his body and polishing the gold on the other side. Of course it did. Why wouldn't it?

I won't tell you much about the grief ritual itself except to say that it was simple, it lasted a couple of hours, and for most of us, it "worked." That is, we were able to sink into the experience, feel our grief fully and release it, achieve a sense of emptiness and ease. For now. Grieving must be done regularly. I will need to grieve again before long and will have to find a community in my home town to grieve with. You can't do this kind of work alone.

We'd all come to Carolyn's workshop with different losses to grieve. For me, and for some others, I think, family losses and the slipping away of a livable planet intersected as one loss. I was able to cry for both.

We grieved in the presence of photographs of our ancestors. I'm only beginning to look into how people outside western communities think of their forebears. In my experience, when a loved one dies, a service is held, his or her life is remembered and celebrated, we say goodbye, and the body is cremated or buried. In other parts of the world, there is no goodbye. Those who have died are still part of the community, maybe the most important part. They strengthen the living, grieve alongside them, advise them, and require their attention.

The shootings in Charleston on June 17 didn't surprise me very much.  I've been there, seen the elegant colors its bricks are painted, bricks made by slaves from the clay of alligator-infested tidal rivers. I've visited the slave market, which has been turned into a shopping center where crafts once practiced by slaves are sold as artsy souvenirs. I've seen the barbed wire placed on top of the walls around some of the oldest homes after the slave rebellion in Haiti in1791. Charleston whites were scared to death by what happened in Haiti, and they must be scared still since that barbed wire is regularly refreshed. I've looked out on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Confederate artillery fired the first salvos of the Civil War on the Union garrison there. I've seen the Confederate flag flying everywhere, sometimes just above what's called the Gadsden flag, popular these days with the Tea Party.

Gadsden Flag

Tourists crowd Charleston's streets. Its venerable, perfectly preserved hotels fill up with destination weddings. The restaurants are so epicurean I don't have the vocabulary to describe them. Charleston's permanent residents are white.

Black people, descendants of slaves, live around Charleston, on its outskirts. The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, dating from the time when the slaves of Charleston proper needed a church near where they lived, is in white territory. How could a kid like Dylann Roof--imagine his ancestors if you dare--be expected to tolerate that?

I live in a bigger world since Carolyn's workshop, but it's a dying world, a little closer to death every day. I will need to grieve regularly. These last few days I'm grieving for the people a white supremacist killed, for their grieving ancestors, and for their grieving children.

Learning from a Mayan Shaman, #1: The Yucatan

I promised myself that when I came back to this blog, I'd write about books and writing and nothing more. Whoops.

 

Israel May 

My husband and I just returned from Mexico, where we and fifteen others met at the Cancun airport and traveled west by bus to the colonial city of Izamal. We spent a week there driving out to visit Mayan ruins and learning from a Mayan shaman. Gary Stamper, Anyaa McAndrew, and Carolyn Baker--all people I hope to know for the rest of my life--planned the trip. I don't think any of them would object to my saying that the shaman we spent the week with, a quiet, modest man named Israel May, was our teacher and leader. With Israel we visited Mayan ruins in the Yucatan and Quintana Roo states of Northern Mexico--Chichen Itza first, then Ake, Tulum, and the Temple of Ixchel.

From 1800 BC to 1500 AD, the Maya thrived in stages in Central America, primarily in areas that now lie in Mexico and Guatemala. As you probably know, they developed written language, higher mathematics and astronomy, as well as skills that allowed them, without benefit of pack animals or metal tools, to build communities both beautiful and functional, and feed their people. A powerful mystical tradition also grew up.

Why the Maya "disappeared" is a topic of some interest to people in the collapsing cultures of the global North. We know that Mayan cities from the classic period (about 250 AD to 900) were deserted long before Spanish soldiers and priests began their invasions in the 1500s. There is no consensus as to precisely why these communities failed. Some guesses are that a long drought stressed the primary crop, corn, that too many rich demanded service from too few poor, that forests were overcut to clear land for farming and to fuel preparation of the limestone plaster used to ornament buildings.

From the jungles of the south, the Maya moved north. Although the north was dryer, they could tap into water tables at shallow depths. In magnificent cities like Chichen Itza and Tulum, the Maya maintained a culture remarkably uniform through the centuries until the Spanish tried their best to wipe it and them out.

Chichen Itza, Pyramid of Kukulcan, "The Castle"

Ake, roof of marketplace missing. Although Ake is Early Classic, older than Chichen Itza, it is not yet completely unearthed.  

Tulum, El Castillo

Temple of the Goddess Ixchel, Isla Mujeres


The Mayan people, however, have not disappeared. We saw them, small in body, forthright in gaze, everywhere we went. Israel learned his shamanic skills from his grandmother and now educates northerners in ancient ways, doing as much good as he can for visitors who have trouble benefitting from what they don't understand.

More to come.

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Photo credits: Israel May (trip members: who took this?); Chichen Itza, Ake, Tulum by Warren Miller; Temple of Ixchel, Google Images. 

Living in the End Times

I’m not talking about shaking hands with the beast with seven heads or airmailing red calves to Jerusalem or sending Kirk Cameron on a mission to sniff out the Antichrist.  When I say we’re living in the end times, I’m referring to what everyone who can stand to watch CNN for more than a few seconds knows all too well. California and Russia burn, New Orleans and Pakistan and Australia flood, summer cruises through what used to be the polar ice caps will soon be bookable through your travel agent. There are too many people living on this planet, and some of us have been living too well.

Remember when Dick Cheney said that the American way of life was not negotiable? I’m pretty sure he meant for the Cheney family.  Here and abroad, the rich are bearing down on the poor, to make sure that what’s left stays in the right hands. And the poor are catching on.

When I think about this stuff, the muscles in my neck freeze up. And I’ve been thinking about it for years.  Maybe you read James Kunstler’s blog on Monday mornings, too, and every word that Bill McKibben uttereth. Maybe Clive Hamilton is your go-to guy, as he is mine, and Michael Ruppert seems crazy only some of the time.  Maybe, like me, you recently reread Albert Camus’ The Plague and sit down every day, as Carolyn Baker advises in Navigating the Coming Chaos, to let your grief wash over you.  Maybe, in spite of everything, you can’t accept that your kids’ lives will be hard, that all the inoculations, tuition payments, library books, cupcakes, and musical instruments you provided won’t keep them safe on a used-up planet.

Today I’m holding on to those who are still alive under the rubble in Sendai and environs, or on some half-navigable road trying to get out of the range—whatever that might be—of radioactive fallout. I hope they have some sense of not being alone, of being part of one suffering world. I hope my compassion and yours reaches them. I hope they and their children survive.