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.

All Things Superhero

I'm an explorer without a compass these days, writing about what happens to be on my mind.

Thirty years ago, when my older son, Alex, was five or six, he made a habit of waking up early, an hour before his baby brother, and waking me up, too. When the coffee was ready, I sat beside him on the sofa and read to him from a collection of Spiderman comics strung together and reduced to a mass-market paperback. The print was minuscule. At 6 AM, even with my glasses on and downing coffee at a good clip, the words in the speech balloons were hard to bring into focus. But the effort was worth it. Being there with Alex, his head leaning against my left arm, the smell of his hair, the nap of the corduroy sofa, my old red bathrobe--I love remembering these things.

It must have been important to Alex to spend that time with me, but I'm pretty sure that the book was more important. He was riveted by Peter Parker, the radioactive spider bite, the boy's transformation to Spiderman and his ensuing heroics. Alex's inner life, his backyard play dates with himself, were, right up until puberty, all about superheroes. I've come to believe that the Spiderman book, the boxes and boxes of comics that until recently were stored in our basement, the never-ending series of superhero TV shows and movies, that all things superhero helped Alex, who was three years old when his parents divorced, reknit his psyche.

Am I wrong or is the volume of superhero stuff in our culture still growing? Is there ever a time these days, for example, when a Marvel or DC comics hero isn't sailing across a screen at the multiplex?

I've never read Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, but I think I know the basics. Heroes go on journeys to lands where supernatural forces are at work. They face obstacles, internal and external, in order to bring back some essential wisdom to their communities.

One man (usually a man) steps up to attempt the heroic task because he's decided, for one reason or another, that he's the man to do it. If you've been bitten by a radioactive spider and can suddenly swing from skyscraper to skyscraper, stepping up might be the obvious choice, but if you're a hobbit, half the size of everyone around you, and you've never been away from home, it's a little harder to find the courage to say, "I will take the ring though I do not know the way." Luckily, Frodo doesn't have to go by himself.

I've always been suspicious of the idea that we need heroes. Wouldn't it be better if we ordinary, imperfect people banded together, encouraged and instructed each other, shared our intuitions and ideas? Wouldn't that improve our chances of surviving the superheating of the earth more effectively than the sudden appearance of super-smart, super-powered heroes? What if we stopped waiting for a savior and stepped up ourselves?

Okay, maybe at this late date, this eleventh hour, we need both ordinary and extraordinary people.

I just read Ben Percy's new novel, The Dead Lands, a dystopian fantasy in which a few people set out from what they believe to be the only surviving human settlement in North America toward a land of plenty that may or may not exist. Most go not for heroic reasons but because the settlement is a horrific place governed by a vile man. Risking their lives outside its walls feels better than staying put. One character, however, is chosen for the trip, summoned. His name is Lewis Meriwether.

All the party have impressive skills, but Meriwether and one other are armed with special gifts. Unfortunately, these gifts don't apply in every situation, and they are dwarfed by the sequence of dangers the group encounters. Imagine the Donner Party fighting monsters created by radioactive fallout--giant bats, bison, bears, and spiders. There are lots of reasons to like The Dead Lands--interesting ideas, consistently great writing, fully imagined female characters, and some really scary shit--but the main reason I liked it is that the hero's journey is ultimately successful because of mutual help and developing trust.

This is not the first time Percy has interrogated the idea of heroism. See, for example, his short story "Refresh, Refresh." But he hasn't given up on the solo crusader either. He's writing the comic Green Arrow now. Number 41, just released, begins a story set in a foggy, failing Seattle. Black men are getting murdered at a terrifying pace. Timely.

Creaking and Yielding

A wonderful book

"We are jury-rigged creatures, psychically; one cannot start down the road of undoing the self's slapdash constructions without the whole structure starting to creak and yield."

                                -- Tim Farrington, in A Hell of Mercy

What took me to Mexico in February, and then to Mallorca? Dryness. Immobility. Exhaustion, usually following a day of doing almost nothing. When you get to this place, trying something different, unlike anything the "you" you know would do, begins to seem like your only move.

Since Mallorca, I've been suffering from a bad cold, as bad as the colds I used to get from hanging out with little kids who stuck their fingers in my eyes and up my nose to show me how much they liked me. I've stayed in bed for a few days. Now I'm sitting in my office wondering what's next. What new rock-solid beliefs about myself are going to crumble, and who will I be when they do?

What really worries me is that I'll manage to glue myself back together again before I'm finished falling apart, that my box (see my last blog) won't expand, may even contract, that I'll stop these changes before they go too far. Where would be too far? The place where I feel no ground under my feet. Where I grasp (despite everything I've been given) the utter emptiness of my life. But that's where God lives, I suspect, and where whatever I do will come from the deepest place in me. I have to go to that place if I want to do anything during the last quarter of my life--and what may turn out to be the sunset years of human life on earth--besides watch television.

I've signed up for the next step after Expand the Box: Possibility Labs. These will happen for me in late June right here in Washington State. In the meantime, there's the little problem of my vocation, what I do when I get up in the morning. For the last 10 or 15 years, depending on when I start counting, this vocation has been writing. I've published some stories and put together a story collection that I haven't tried very hard to get into print. Not much to show for 10 -15 years.

I've started several books too, of course. The two that are choking my inboxes right now are an attempt at autobiography and a mystery. At the moment neither seems worth investing in. The first is the story I've been telling myself about my leaving-home experiences, the transition from my family's house to a freshman dorm at Stanford. How I understand those years will certainly change in the near future. The mystery is an effort to write something marketable, but no one I've shown it to likes it much. I don't know if I've learned not to like it from them or if it really isn't very entertaining.

I guess I'll start with cleaning up my space. Books are piled everywhere, magazines are stacked waist-high. I've already stripped my bulletin board.

Then I'll sit down and see what happens.

Tim Farrington again:

"I kept coming back to the desk every morning anyway, and I am convinced, in retrospect, that this is a key element in the dark night reaching critical mass: having something, anything, that you will continue to do just for the doing of it, long after every possible reason to do it has evaporated, a leap of faith you are willing to take even after it has become clear that it really does just go straight off that cliff and you're not a hero or a saint or anything even remotely edifying, you're a freakin' idiot and they're going to spell your name wrong on your gravestone."

Two Stories about Me

I just returned from Mallorca, an island in the Mediterranean off the coast of Spain. The Playa de Illetas, one of Mallorca's resort areas, is tidy, tasteful, flowering, breezy. The sea has that aqua-to-blue-to-aqua thing going on that I first saw in Cancun a few months ago. Yet I took no photographs. The photo here is a promotional one.

I traveled to Mallorca to attend a personal training course called Expand the Box, based on the work of Clinton Callahan and his colleagues. Clinton and Marion, our trainers, taught us a different way of thinking called Radical Responsibility. I'm already sounding like someone I don't know, a narcissist who takes an expensive flight to a gorgeous place to self-improve. But that's just a story. We, about 30 of us, heard a lot about stories over the five days of the training.

Some facts first, then the two stories. I should warn you that I'm not entirely sure that what follow are facts. I'm going to be practicing separating facts from stories for some time to come.

I'm the three-year-old in the middle.

I come from working-class parents whose histories left them fearful. My brother and sister are 11 and 8 years older than I am and were entering adulthood and leaving home about the time that my father became very ill. He was 63 then, my mother was 48, and I was 10. My mother went to work at night so that either she or I would be available to care for my father.

I did well in school, left home at 18 for college on scholarship and returned to live in my hometown afterward. I married once, then twice, and had my first child. My siblings moved to other states and visited my parents occasionally. During my twenties I spent a lot of time in the car driving from my home in Palo Alto, California to my parents' mobile home in Sacramento. After my son was born--I was 27 then--he came with me.

My parents died 16 months apart, my father when I was 29, and my mother when I was 30. My brother and sister came to see my parents during their last illnesses, but left quickly. For all intents and purposes I was the child responsible for visiting my parents regularly during their last decade and, toward the end of it, for interacting with their doctors and sitting at their bedsides.

The story I told myself before Expand the Box: (Once upon a time in the galaxy far, far away that I call my childhood) my parents conceived me, long after their other two children, so they would have a child to care for them in their old age. They were proud of my successes in school but not entirely comfortable with them. Like the parents of children described in Alice Miller's books, they sometimes discouraged me, either to protect me from disappointment or to keep me from going too far away from them. I was what is often called a parental child, caring for them more than a child should be expected to, until I went to college. At college, the growing up I couldn't do at home, the "normal" experiences adolescents have in our culture that I had skipped, made life difficult.

My siblings had their own problems and forgot or resisted thinking about mine. The chaos of my twenties--marriage, divorce, remarriage--gave them an excuse to view me as a person who would have been troubled even without taking responsibility for our parents. When they left me at the hospital during my mother's final days, they did this with clear consciences.

The story I am able to tell myself now: I was born into a family established in its ways, and I wanted to make a place for myself in it. I couldn't compete with my brother and was determined that my mother would treat me better than my sister, so I tried to be the perfect, shiny, smart and sometimes even a little bit pretty child. I used church teachings to convince myself that good works make you better than others, and hunkered down to do my parental child thing at home.

After college I didn't know what kind of work I wanted to do, and I was temporarily husband- and boyfriend-less, so my father's first heart attack provided an excuse for me to retreat to Sacramento. Visiting and caring for my parents became the one steady element of my twenties, the one thing that made me feel like a worthwhile person. During my parents' final illnesses, I conveyed in one way or another (I conveniently can't remember exactly how) that it was all right for my siblings to leave me with our parents. I would do the work. They might not be able to, but I was and I would. When my mother died and I sat alone watching the undertakers zip her body into a black plastic bag, I told myself that I had won. I was the best of my parents' children. I always had been, and I'd gone the distance. I had done the work until it was finished.

Which of these stories is true? I learned in Mallorca that it doesn't matter. What matters is which story makes me feel as if my life belongs to me. If I need to reframe my story to say that my nearest and dearest didn't use me as a crutch so much as I became one in order to feel good about myself, then that's what I do. Because I feel stronger. Because my box becomes bigger. I'm able to stand up straight in it, for example.

I've been trying to think myself out of my good-girl role for decades. It's not a comfortable home for an adult. A sticky, pink residue has clung to me day in and day out, a little like the stuff that forms the bathtub ring in The Cat in the Hat Comes Back. You can take a bath in that tub, and scrub and scrub, but you won't get clean.

I live near my siblings now, and recently I began trying to talk about how they let me down 30 years ago. You can imagine how these conversations went. I figured out pretty fast--and this conviction was reinforced in Mallorca--that I couldn't work through this stuff and let go of it by talking to them, not armed with all the anger I still felt. I had to wade back into the anger on my own and hope I could start fresh with my siblings on the other side. I believe I stumbled on exactly the right program to help me do that. Thank whomever.

Read about Expand the Box at nextculture.org. Clinton Callahan's most recent book, Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings, will take you some distance toward grokking this stuff, but I recommend showing up for a training. For trainings in the U.S., see nextculture-us.com.

Mexico: Not Quite a Round Trip

Spoiler alert: This post--the last about my trip to the Yucatan--is going to be a little personal, maybe even Hallmarky.

You know those cards that feature a riderless horse racing along a beach? If the card is for sale in the red states, the message inside will say Be joyful! God has plans for you. In the blue states, the card will either be blank (so as not to constrain the sender's freedom of expression by putting words in her mouth) or will feature a fragment of a Rilke quote: Live the questions--and . . . enjoy! 

I live in a blue state, always have. I wouldn't survive in a red state. I'd piss so many people off by asking personal questions and teasing out hypocrisies--in my maddeningly polite but actually very aggressive way--that I'd be ostracized within a week. My M.O. in life has been to poke holes in others' certainties while respecting the fundamental value of the people that hold them. I've been argumentative, but most of the time I've also been generous. I've tried to show up when I could help. And I've been honest, usually, about my own failings. I've fought the good fight, in my small way, for open-mindedness and inclusion, for kindness, for not having to be perfect.  Live the questions! I've said. It's not so bad! Enjoy!

Meanwhile, in my heart of hearts, I've nurtured some pretty dreadful certainties of my own.

One version of the infamous hockey stick graph. Not good news.

Since I read The Limits to Growth in the 70s, it's been pretty clear to me that economies couldn't keep growing, that we couldn''t keep buying whatever struck our fancy, that we shouldn't look for heroes or try to be heroes ourselves but learn instead to lead humble, useful lives. If we failed to turn our thinking around, our cultural assumptions, we would ruin the planet we lived on. And we have. I have. But that's not one of the certainties I referred to above.

Those certainties follow: There is

• No point in trying to live a satisfying life between now and the predicted 50-gigaton release of methane that will wipe us all out within years. 
• No point in continuing to grow up, learn, heal.
• No point in writing my stories about generosity to self and others. (Only a tiny fraction of them ever get published anyway.) 
• No point in looking for people who see what I see (there are a lot more of these people now than there used to be) and clinging to them. Who has that much energy?
• No point in feeling any feeling that doesn't take our impending doom into consideration.
• No point in grieving that doom in a way that might release me from the inchoate haze I've been in.
• No point in opening the door to see what's outside this poisonous culture. The door is stuck. And what if I manage to open it and then lock myself out? If I change my circumstances before the methane changes them for me, what if the new life is too hard, too exhausting, too unpleasant? What if I'm not up to it? 

Carolyn and Anyaa

Some of these certainties aren't so certain, you'll notice. They are questions but not the kind that you live into. These are the kind that stop you cold.

Where is Mexico in all this? I met some people there who have found a way to carry on, to make change, to invite others along, to live today, no matter how many more todays we have. (Live the questions, and . . . enjoy!    But also grow and act.)  I met Israel May, Carolyn Baker, Gary Stamper, Anyaa McAndrews, Clinton Callahan, and other lesser known but equally fabulous people. I left and came home, but home doesn't look the same.

Learning from a Shaman, #4: Table Fellowship in Israel's Backyard

In the middle of our week in Izamal, shaman Israel May invited us into his backyard, next door to an age-old Mayan temple, for a traditional meal.

He and his family had prepared pibil, the generic name for food cooked in a pit or "pib." Our pibil was a dough made of masa and black beans wrapped in banana leaves. Israel had set many of these banana-leaf packages, along with squash, tomatoes, and citrus fruit, in a ceremonial circle ringed with flowers. When the rocks lining the bottom of the pit were the right temperature, we each chose an item of food and handed it to Israel. He lifted the food and our joined hands toward the sky, placed the food carefully on the rocks, then covered the food with sacking and the red dirt we'd seen everywhere in the Yucatan. It would take a couple of hours for the food to cook, so we got back on the bus and drove to the Ake ruins.

Ake is an early classic city, built centuries before post-Classic Chichen Itza and Tulum. It has been only partially excavated, but much grandeur has already surfaced. There was a school nearby, too, and it was good to hear children's voices. There was something else, too--dwellings, not of kings and priests, but of common people.

Israel showed us two caves set about 20 feet apart on a hill. When he was halfway up the steep path to these dwellings he said, "Stop here! You'll feel something right here." I didn't, and it made me sad. But on top of the hill, sitting near one of the caves, I began to imagine the people who had once lived there, smaller and darker-skinned than I am but otherwise the same, women, in particular, who cooked out of doors, gave birth, looked after their children, stored the bones of their dead, and themselves died. I felt something then.

By the time the bus returned to Israel's house, with the temple next door, the pit holding our food, I was in a place to appreciate what I was being offered, the sacred gift of friendship.

Israel and his brother excavated the food, laid it out on a small table in the garden, and we ate sitting on rocks. Nevertheless, we were practicing table fellowship. That's how it seemed to me.

If you've avoided church pews most of your life, you'll have to forgive me for this comparison. Christianity is where I started. I'm still trying to separate what's beautiful in it from what's hideous, but it's impossible to set aside entirely. An old friend once said of the effort to walk away, "It's too deep in me."

What I mean by table fellowship is this: Jesus invited the marginal--tax collectors, prostitutes, menstruating women, foreigners, the sick, and people too poor to pay for required sacrifices at the temple--to eat with him. (Unlike Israel, he didn't cook the meal himself. Remember Mary and Martha? That whole quagmire? Others cooked. Women cooked.) But by eating together, sitting down and breaking bread, he showed to those who were either temporarily or permanently not "our kind of people" that as far as he and the god he believed in were concerned, they were unblemished; they counted; they belonged.

In Mexico, I sometimes felt as if I were marginalized--by the people I knew least, and whose opinion I valued most, the Mexicans who lived there. This was most disturbing in Cancun, where our trip started and ended. Cancun is infested by fancy hotels and beach houses, clubbing opportunities, and giant statues of Spiderman. Apart from the mesmerizing water, aqua to indigo to aqua again, Cancun is Las Vegas South.

Mexican service workers make their living there by catering to our tastelessness. I saw resignation on some faces and barely disguised rage on others. In Izamal, on the other hand, people were friendly, waving at us as they bicycled by on the street, or smiling up into the windows of our bus. They seemed glad to see us, or maybe just glad to see Israel, who seemed to know every last one of them. Yet even in Izamal I felt foreign, ignorant, intrusive, and a lot of other unpleasant things.

The meal Israel offered us relieved me of those feelings, at least for a while. Blessing food by raising it up and eating it together? A Eucharist. Burying food in the ground and digging it up later? A sort of resurrection. Doing all this outdoors? Fellowship with people through the ages who lived simply on the land. A vision of our own future, maybe, if we're lucky enough to have a future.

******************

Trip photos by Tracy O'Neill. Photo of Ake temple from Wikipedia.

Interlude: A Bowl of Raspberry Oatmeal

Carl Sagan once said something along these lines: If, after the resurrection, Jesus had ascended into heaven at the speed of light, he still wouldn't have cleared the galaxy.

Maybe that's the wrong metaphor for what happened to me this morning, but I'm going with it anyway.

For a long time I've been trying to see the big picture. You need a high perch to see what's happening to the earth as a whole, to wrap your mind around humanity's non-future, to consider what, if anything, you might try to do about it. That's why I traveled to the Yucatan. That's why I've visited certain websites way too often over the years. That's where I've been living, in a shaky house in a very tall tree that has nevertheless felt not tall enough.

How far up would I have to go? How tall would my tree need to be?

Since Wednesday night I've been hanging out at my niece's house. She's been in a Seattle hospital having surgery. Something needed to be taken out, and that something needed to be biopsied. It wasn't cancerous. Hallelujah. She'll be coming home in a day or two, and that's good because her three daughters miss her a LOT. They miss their father too, who's with my niece at the hospital.

This morning I asked the middle daughter, Harper, who is ten (I think) and has seemed to be the most rattled by her mother's absence, what she wanted for breakfast.

"I want blueberry oatmeal," she said, plain as day.

Since my niece and her husband adopted Harper--she was three at the time--her speech development has been slow. It's possible that she suffered some brain damage during her birth in China. Lately, though, she's been making fast progress. In any case, there was no mistaking "I want blueberry oatmeal."

I couldn't find any blueberries, but there was a bag of frozen raspberries in the freezer. "Is raspberry oatmeal okay?"

A grudging nod. She took a bowl out of the cupboard and placed it at the center of the kitchen island, which is where breakfast gets eaten in this very organized household.

I poured some raspberries into the bowl I'd put on the counter for my own breakfast, thawed them in the microwave, cooked the oatmeal on the stove, poured the oatmeal on top of the raspberries, and set the bowl in front of Harper.

She stared into the bowl, looking utterly appalled. Her younger sister. Hunter, said to me, "I think you were supposed to mix it together."

I handed Harper a spoon. "You can go ahead and mix it up."

She mixed it up and stared into the bowl some more.

Hunter, ever helpful, said, "Mom puts cinnamon on it."

I shook some cinnamon on Harper's oatmeal. Still she stared into the bowl. After a minute she pushed it away, stretched out an arm, and lay her head on it.

"Hannah," I said to the oldest sister, a teenager. "Help me out here."

Hannah said softly, "She's just being Harper."

And what did I do? I repeated those words loud enough for Harper to hear them. "She's just being Harper," I said--trying to figure out what was wrong, trying to reassure myself that it had nothing to do with me.

Harper, her head still down, started to cry. For a long minute none of the rest of us said anything, neither Hunter nor Hannah nor I.

"She doesn't like the bowl," Hunter finally suggested.

Then I saw right in front of me the bowl that Harper had chosen. I'd put her oatmeal in the one I'd chosen. I poured the oatmeal from my bowl into hers, and she ate it, all but the last bite, although the bowl wasn't the real problem.

When you're in a very tall tree, you can miss things, especially small things, things on the ground that require care. Being careful with small things is work worth doing in this terrifying, unprecedented time.

What does all this have to do with the Carl Sagan quote? Probably nothing. I've just always liked that quote.


Next time: A Shared Mayan Meal--What's On, and In, the Ground

Talking About Collapse in Mayan Territory

The Doomsday Clock, recently reset two minutes ahead, to 11:57.

We didn't talk about collapse--at least not much--and that surprised me.

During our week in Izamal, Israel was busy in the evenings. Sometimes he did bodywork for members of the group, but otherwise he was elsewhere. I wonder how much he would have said about planetary collapse--of our economies, habitats, and cultures--even if he'd been around. He seemed more interested in showing us ways to live based on spiritual principles sounder, or more deeply held, than our own.

If we'd traveled together longer, maybe we would have talked more about our feelings and plans in the face of collapse, but during our ten days together, we were busy looking at ruins, taking pictures, having adventures, and learning from our leaders new ways to feel stronger in these scary times. When we did approach the subject of collapse directly, I felt that most of us were holding back.

The topic of one brief conversation was how directly the Mayan experience applied to our own. The Post-Classic Maya of the Yucatan were in the end invaded and conquered by the Spanish. That didn't seem likely to happen to us, those of us who were Americans at least, armed to the teeth as our country is. Earlier Maya suffered from drought, overuse of resources, and stratified, top-heavy, disorganized societies. Those stresses did seem to apply to us. How did these Maya die in the end? Starvation, probably. No one wanted to talk about that.

I've had some experience talking to others about rapidly rising temperatures, the melting Arctic, the messed up Jet Stream, gridlocked government, the dying ocean and burning forests. These conversations have never gone well. I don't regret them but didn't want to repeat them on the trip, and I guess most of the rest of the group didn't either. Probably we already shared a roughly similar body of knowledge about these things. Some of us, I know, were trying to face up to the idea of near-term human extinction, a very rapid collapse caused by huge methane releases and probably already in progress.

But I was hungry to hear about individual circumstances, what people were planning to do, what was going on inside their heads. Maybe I should have said that louder.

Gary Stamper, for example, talked about his and his partner's situation in a loosely formed community with no children growing up to carry it on. He spoke as well about the impossibility of preparing adequately for "cliff events" such as a new, rapidly spreading virus or a currency collapse. I appreciated his honesty.

A gradual, stepwise collapse seems more probable to me. For that we have to band together in small communities, share, barter, help, look out for the most vulnerable. These strategies won't work in the long run--I don't think any strategy will save us--but in the short run, depending on community might be the only thing that will make life bearable.

Our six travelers from Germany seemed interested in the possibility that some of us might survive--if we can learn to live a different way. They train people in a remarkable program of personal development called Possibility Management.  I plan to learn more about that and about autonomous zones (see, for example, http://yubia.blog.com), a movement they are interested in fostering. I got the distinct impression, however, that Possibility Management begins with and insists on, if not optimism, a positive outlook. At this point I'd have to have a brain transplant to conjure up a positive outlook. A peaceful one might become possible, but a positive one, no.

Carolyn Baker spoke about collapse becoming a vehicle that would lead the willing toward a less egoistic state and ultimately to a transformation of consciousness. What that might feel like, no one can know. I've been pondering it anyway.

These exchanges pointed to a future none of us can see its entirety. Guessing, despite the flood of information finally coming out about trouble ahead, is also problematic. Since we are facing something the Maya did not face, something brand new and devastating in its emotional impact, the extinction of life on an entire planet, I guess it's not surprising that we have to look at it and talk about it a little at a time.

Before the trip, Gary wrote, "I think by going, I’ll be saying through the Mayan collapse and to the Maya, in a way I cannot do from home, that we are connected, that they are not alone. And neither am I."

I like that.

Tulum. The Maya couldn't go any further north without falling into the sea. 

Learning from a Mayan Shaman, #3: Chichen Itza

A few thoughts of my own before I return to Israel's . . .

Chichen Itza, a post-classic Mayan City in the northern Yucatan important between 600 and 1200 A.D., is included in some Seven Wonders of the World lists. I could see why when I stood at the foot of the Pyramid of Kukulkan and looked up its steep steps toward the hulking temple on top, when I walked Chichen Itza's sprawling grounds until its structures seemed to look back at me and I had to turn away, let my mind wander.

Actually, this isn't true. While I was at Chichen Itza, I registered very little. I was too overwhelmed. Most of these thoughts and feelings surfaced in retrospect.

From my limited travels, I've been able to call up only one comparison to this haunted place--the Roman Forum. Both the Forum and Chichen Itza were built over time and contain structures used for religion and government. Chichen Itza was also a city, of course, where people lived, worked and were laid to rest, whereas the Forum was only part of a city, a gathering place for the people in charge. But both are artifacts of empires that perished. Both insist on the ultimacy of power.

The Arch of Titus, for example, located just off the Roman Forum, commemorates the emperor who led the siege of Jerusalem in 70 A.D, resulting in the destruction of the Second Temple, the deaths of a million Jews, and the Diaspora. "Whoopee!" this structure seems to say. "We wiped out an entire culture!" The Romans didn't succeed in wiping out the Jewish people or their culture, of course, although Europeans would continue trying to do this for millennia to come.

Like the Pyramid, Chichen Itza's Temple of the Warriors is dedicated to Kukulkan, the plumed serpent, whose role in classic Maya society centered on sacrificial rites. The serpent served a sort of lightning rod up to the gods. In post-classic Chichen Itza, when the city was most powerful, Kukulkan was also a king. This double identity confused me until I remembered that Augustus Caesar was also both god and king (at least according to Augustus Caesar).

The Temple of Warriors was built about 1000 AD. By this time the Toltec people and the Maya had interacted, possibly in wars that left the Toltec in charge. Toltec influence on the Temple is said to be strong. The ranks of columns, each column representing a guerrero, once supported a roof. Roofless, the columns seemed to move rather than stand still, as if in procession.

Israel laid a hand on one of these columns and said, "A warrior built this, to make himself immortal. And now he is."

I said above that Chichen Itza was haunted, but the spirits seemed all male to me.

"These buildings are all towers, built toward the sky," I said to Israel. "Toward sky gods. Male gods."

"No, there are structures that go down too," Anyaa, one of the trip planners and a shamanic priestess, said.  "Remember the excavation Israel showed us." Archaeologists had unearthed above-ground structures before looking below ground, but the digging down had begun. "Remember the seven points."

During our purification ceremony, we'd followed Israel's lead by turning toward the East, South, West and North (I may have the order wrong), by reaching for the sky and kneeling to touch the ground. At the center of the circle was the point at which an axis--knowing a little more, I see this now as a snake or  tree--connected the underworld, this world, and the realm of the gods and ancestors above. Seven points.

Cenote at Chichen Itza, inaccessible to visitors

I remembered as well that we were going to visit several cenotes, the underground rivers that made Mayan life in the Yucatan possible. I looked forward to swimming in one or two.

Israel drew a series of concentric circles on the ground, identifying the gatekeepers between the circles, officials whose importance increased the closer they stood to the center. Many of these officials, Israel said, were women.

Yet the bottom line for me was that Chichen Itza was built by the powerless for the powerful. I was as uncomfortable there as I'd been at Versailles or Hearst Castle. The spirits of the women who'd lived and worked there, raised their children there, didn't speak to me. Nor did those of the men, some of them slaves (as is true in nearly all ancient cultures), whose lives were consumed by hard labor.

More to come: Evenings together talking about collapse.

*****************
Photos from Google Images

Learning from a Mayan Shaman, #2: Purification

Landa's church, dedicated to St. Anthony of Padua

Izamal, the "Yellow City," contains what is left of a cluster of Mayan temples. These were lowered--the structures on top taken down--and the stones used to build a Catholic church and monastery over what had been the tallest pyramid. The church still stands. Diego de Landa Calderon, a Franciscan, supervised its construction in the 1560s. He collected valuable information about the Maya people, their culture, and their language. But he also conducted inquisitions into Mayan leaders' supposed attempts to sabotage Catholic conversions. Some of these investigations led to executions. Believing the Maya to be idolaters, he destroyed as many of their artifacts as he could, including most of their bifold books. I tell you all this to put Israel's work with us in context.

On our first day with Israel, just a few blocks from the church above, he conducted a purification ceremony next to an old temple. He stood over a circular altar on the ground about a yard in diameter. The altar included sacred objects, some of which were Israel's tools, candles, flowers, and a few of the group's possessions we thought might need cleansing--my watch, for example.

Israel's circle after the ceremony, many objects removed.

I didn't know what to expect from Israel's ceremony. I'd done a little reading (part of Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman's Path, by Freidel, Schele and Parker), but hadn't taken much of it in. What was I being cleansed of exactly? What was corrupting me? Was I signing up for something like Catholic confession? That didn't sound good. I've made a few big mistakes in my life, but I've never hidden them, never let them turn poisonous in the dark. If my impurities were those I'd "caught" from modern culture, I would have been happy to kiss them goodbye, although I wasn't sure what habits or resources I'd be able to put in their place. And how exactly would Israel cleanse me?

I don't want to say much about what Israel did. He shares the skills he learned from his forebears as he

Israel with the conch shell.

sees fit. It's not up to me to make them public. And the others in the group who stepped up to be purified--each underwent a different rite--will tell or not tell what happened to them as they wish.  I only have my story, and I couldn't even see it all unfold.

What did the stones he was moving around and behind my feet signify? Why was he blowing his giant conch shell right next to my head? Why was he blowing it so long and loud? Was it necessary to wave that smoky substance all over me?

I was anxious about many things. I wished the rest of the group wasn't watching. Apart from my husband, I'd known these others exactly one day.

What if I didn't get it? What if this young man brought his wisdom to bear and it rolled right off me? What if my corruption was too deep?

What if everything Israel was doing was hocus pocus? A chorus of scoffing voices erupted in my head.

My purification lasted about ten minutes. Later a new friend from the group told me what he saw: Israel setting a black stone behind my feet--signifying something that had happened to me that I needed to leave behind--and blowing the conch shell to call my soul back into my body.

Whatever the nature of the ceremony, when I sat down afterward, under the trees that surrounded the altar, I was confident that Israel, this shaman, this doctor, could be trusted. He had helped me. I felt lighter, ready for something new.

More to come.

**********

Photos by Tracy O'Neill

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.

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

Everyone Who Can Bear to Know Knows

This photo of a starving polar bear dates from 2007, I think. (It's hard to find the original sources of photos that go viral, as this one has.) Who knows how many of these animals look this way now? I'm including it because my heart is well and truly broken by it and to explain why the nature of this blog is about to change (should you care).

I can't write anymore about the most important thing happening in the world now, that it's ending. Everyone who can bear to know knows. Nothing we can say to those in denial will break through their capitalism- or technology-will-save-us fantasies. If Naomi Klein, with her exhaustive documentation and crystal clear prose, can't persuade the literate, no one can. And the illiterate are drowning in a sea of broadcast lies. Now? According to the New York Times this morning, Mitch McConnell, soon-to-be majority leader of the Senate, has "vowed" to demand completion of the Keystone Pipeline and to limit the enforcement and impact of EPA laws. Two years of this? We don't have two days to waste.

So I'm going to write about writing, and reading, and maybe about going to movies. Not because I don't think about the rest, but because I do. Check in with me once in a while. I'll have some good recommendations for you. 

Once you know who the bad guys are, what are your choices?

I'm interested in American movies. Trapped methane may be blowing holes in the Siberian tundra, but if Brendan Gleason or Maggie Gyllenhaal stars in a new movie, I'm there, and with almost no critical awareness. I read perceptively, I think, because I also write. But I've never made a film, even on my phone, or taken a film class, and I don't plan to. I don't pay attention to who directs a movie, or what the lighting is like or where the camera had to be to get a particular shot. In my local multiplex and in front of a Netflix menu, I'm just looking for stories that tell me something. I'm Jane Q. Public.

It's not that I don't have preferences, even standards. Car chases aren't high on my list of favorite things because they're boring. If I can't see the actors' faces during a sex scene, if I can't gauge the characters' investment, then my mind wanders pretty fast.

Until a year or two ago, I was terribly sensitive to violence on the screen. But I'm angrier now than I used to be, and sometimes I seek out bloody films. When the victims are women and children (as is increasingly the case), I'm gratified when the bad guys get blown away or gored by bulls or decapitated by giant robots. I might cover my eyes for a few crucial seconds, but I don't rush to the bathroom like I used to. I stay put, and I think, hmmm . . . what has happened to me? Why am I enjoying this?

A couple of weekends ago I went to see The Equalizer, starring Denzel Washington, on Friday night, and dragged my husband back to the multiplex the next morning to see A Walk among the Tombstones, starring Liam Neeson. As movie reviewers everywhere have pointed out, these two films are nearly identical.

In both films, an aging enforcer tries to resist being drawn into fights. But the bad guys are so bad, the victims so defenseless and brutally used, that the enforcer finally steps forward. No one else is going to stand up for those who are already dead or those in imminent danger.

In The Equalizer, Denzel's character  promised his late wife that he'd give up violence. He now lives a quite life managing a store resembling Home Depot. Something isn't right with him, though, because he can't sleep. He spends the wee hours in a diner reading Hemingway and chatting with other regulars, one of whom is a very young prostitute who ends up in the hospital, beaten almost to death. Denzel makes short work--mass murder takes him exactly 19 seconds--of those responsible, a local ring of drug-dealing pimps. A CIA connection tells him the men he's killed are a tiny branch of . . . wait for it . . . the Russian Mafia, popular bad guys in movies these days. Denzel pulls that tree up by its roots. Although he tells the young prostitute that she can be anything she wants, including a famous singer, Denzel himself returns to being what we used to call a vigilante, mainly, he says, because he can.

In A Walk among the Tombstones, Neeson's character helps a bereaved husband whose wife has been kidnapped, killed and chopped up, despite the fact that he paid a ransom for her. It turns out that the husband is a drug dealer, as are other victims' husbands and fathers. Neeson has to figure out what the connection is between their business and the kidnappings. It isn't the obvious one, a rival enterprise, but something a bit more surprising. The bad guys turn out to be what TV news anchors like to call mentally disturbed individuals, in this case two very scary men. As Neeson hunts them down, he also protects a young friend and sets him on a path to realizing his artistic talents. Neeson knows well what his own talents are and has every intention of continuing to use them.

The Equalizer is a simpler, less interesting movie than A Walk among the Tombstones, and more violent as well. But both give us loners who take matters into their own hands. American films are chock full of these figures. The prototype may be Gary Cooper in High Noon. In their worlds, the institutions that ought to bring down the bad guys are either incompetent or corrupt or immobilized by fear. If these lone crusaders don't do it, no one will.

I've been thinking a lot about . . . uprisings (trying to use a word here that won't set an NSA computer dinging).  It may be too late to do anything at all about the survival of life above single-cell levels on earth, but if we can bring ourselves to act--it's a lot healthier than passivity--we ought to begin by putting aside what we learned in Sunday School or at our therapists' offices: do unto others, forgiveness is always better than anger, every one of us is both good and evil.

Because at this point, it's pretty clear that a few people on earth have a big lead on the rest of us when it comes to evil. They've done and continue to do pornographic damage in Alberta and the Gulf of Mexico. They're emptying aquifers and cutting down forests and fishing out the oceans and writing off the poor of the world.  Any possible renewal of the old social contract that might require them to take the tiniest bit of responsibility for someone else causes them to cascade cash onto their lobbyists.

But let us not be loners. We'd do better to take these bad guys on together, given that no one I know has Denzel's purported skills. If the CEOs and chairmen of the board see themselves as special and apart, surely we ought to move in another direction and see ourselves as fellow creatures, empower each other to act, even to do violence if that is the only thing that will work.

Crack in the Wall

The fIrst storm of the year arrived last night in Bellingham. The temperature is still in the low sixties, but the wind billowed out the curtains at the open bedroom windows all night long, and this morning the rain is . . . light but heavy. I'm not sure how to say that better. The drops fall softly, but there are a lot of them?

Our neighborhood park is well on its way to becoming a swamp, as my dog, Alice, would testify if she could speak. (I think she's learned English but is still keeping it a secret.) Poet Carol Guess and her two dogs were at the park, too, but about the time we spotted each other, the sky opened, so we trudged in opposite directions, leaving the dogs on leash.

I'm coming out, I hope, of a depression that has lasted about a year. It did me good to see 300,000 people march in New York on Sunday. It's hard to believe that the ecosystem destruction already in progress can be stopped or even significantly mitigated, hard to imagine life here in 20 years as anything other than hot, wet, and ruled by overwhelming scarcity. But it was still good to see so many people addressing that reality, those fears, and even better to see the diehards show up and sit in at Broadway and Morris on Monday. I feel communal anger building. I sense the beginning of a truly oppositional culture. I feel less alone.

I'm about to start Naomi Klein's new book, This Changes Everything. If you're reading it too, let me know what you think. 

Simplest Wisdom

I've been inside during the last hot week, stepping outside only long enough to water the vegetables. This morning, a cool breeze blew in, so I went downtown to pick up some books at the library, see the bay, and walk along the creek.

A bronze bell like this one hangs along the Whatcom Creek Trail,  cast by sculptor Tom Jay.  The unattributed text that circles the bottom reads

"Our simplest wisdom is to follow the sea-bright salmon home."

These are the most comforting words I've heard in a long time.