A Mad Victim of Our Own Brainwashing

That was just a little chalk drawing on a path through a beautiful wood in a park somewhere in rural Washington State.

I wasn't going to write anything about it, but the Pacific Northwest certainly rivals the South (where I grew up and which, arguably, gets a whole lot more flak for its unsavory racists than other parts of the country) in evidence of racism and white supremacy. Yeah, I know the whole Pacific Northwest is one of the least diverse areas of the country, and I know that racism in overt and covert forms exists everywhere, in every part of the country, but as the white part of an interracial couple, I'm being educated in ways that I, in my privilege, have been -- let's be honest -- blind to for most of my adult life.

The Bird Photographer and I saw the evidence nearly everywhere we went, and given the general tenor of the times we live in -- well -- we didn't mess around when we saw it. We walked out of a steak house/diner/truck stop and toward our car one evening, passed a small group of older folks standing together at their pickup truck. One of the men was opening what looked like birthday presents, and they spoke openly of Trump, how much they agreed with him, how much they liked him. I know this because I walked right by them and rolled my eyes in my mind, and then I noticed that on the top of the present that the man was opening at the moment was a rolled up Confederate Flag.

I hear a lot of people crying out and writing how fucked we all are! and how this is so unbelievable! and I'm as stressed as the next privileged white liberal person, but let's face the facts. This great country -- and it is great in many ways -- has an ugly core, a rotten core, and the only way to get rid of it is to uncover and face that rotten core, to acknowledge that truth and to speak, own and face the truth relentlessly, no matter how uncomfortable it makes many of us. I think that might mean acknowledging and facing our own darkness, but it also might mean erasing swastikas chalked onto bucolic pathways or speaking up and often, even to those standing in a parking lot with an old, ugly flag. It means opening our eyes to see and using our ears to listen. I wish I'd done both, but I did neither, and I regret that.

“The American Negro has the great advantage of having never believed the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world's most direct and virile, that American women are pure. Negroes know far more about white Americans than that; it can almost be said, in fact, that they know about white Americans what parents—or, anyway, mothers—know about their children, and that they very often regard white Americans that way. And perhaps this attitude, held in spite of what they know and have endured, helps to explain why Negroes, on the whole, and until lately, have allowed themselves to feel so little hatred. The tendency has really been, insofar as this was possible, to dismiss white people as the slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing.” 

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

 

#resist

Writing, Respite and Denali

I'm still here in beautiful rural Washington. There's not much to do but relax and listen to the birds, putter around the beautiful house, wander outside and chat with the goats, read novels (Tommy Orange's There, There and Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen), read some poetry (Marie Howe's Magdalene), eat a plum, eat a peach, let a corner of a chocolate bar melt in my mouth, suck on a Tootsie Pop and gaze at the Bird Photographer.

I haven't written much, but I've arranged and re-arranged my hundreds of pages into a sort of order. It took hours and hours to do that much, but a structure is finally, literally, at the tip of my fingers. My plan is to finish up in the next day or so and then, when I get home, re-type the whole lot and send to the editor as a rough -- extremely rough -- draft.

The Pacific Northwest in the summer is perfection. It was here -- or up in Victoria -- where I spent a week by myself only four years ago, a recipient of the magnificent Heather McHugh's organization, Caregifted. That week changed my life and opened me to the possibility of and hope for more respite from the life of caregiving that, while enormously rewarding and filled with grace, has also drained me of myself or the essence that keeps me vital. I realized then how important it was to seek respite in whatever way I could, to open myself up to the possibility of replenishment and to work just as hard to get that as I do to take care of my daughter. While I am aware of the enormous privileges I've been granted that others just do not have, I also remember the nearly twenty years without significant respite. I remember what it was like to have no hope for it.

We caregivers must get back to ourselves as if our life depended on it because it does.

photographer: Carl Jackson

Listen to the latest Who Lives Like This podcast -- a rousing discussion of nurturing the self with Paige Figi, the director of Coalition for Access Now and the mother of Charlotte of the famous Charlotte's Web cannabis oil. Jason and I interviewed Paige just a week before she climbed Denali, the highest peak in North America. Here's the link:

Who Lives Like This?!

Yeah. I know. Not all of us will climb Denali, even if we desired to do so. Yet, still, there's joy to be had no matter how you choose to find yourself.

As my friend, writer Chris Rice said the other day, Your book is your Denali.


Onward.

All Italics Are Da Vinci's Except For That Moon

I say that the blue which is seen in the atmosphere is not its own colour but is caused by warm humidity evaporated in minute and imperceptible atoms on which the solar rays fall rendering them luminous against the immense darkness of the region of fire that forms a covering above them.

Leonardo da Vinci, from Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci


What happens when everything you see and touch and hear and smell and feel comes to you as in the fulfillment of a dream?

Writing about the kite seems to be my destiny since among the first recollections of my infancy it seemed to me that as I was in my cradle a kite came to me and opened my mouth with its tail and struck me several times with its tail inside my lips. (a dream of Da Vinci's infancy)


The room at the top of the stairs where I learned to rest four years ago, the woman who cared for me like a mother, the courage to send in my writing, the awarding of three weeks in a cottage in the woods in the same part of the world the next year, a great upheaval that led to a bird photographer, an owl, a whale's fluke (like a whirling wind scouring through a sandy and hollow valley which with speeding course drives into its vortex everything that opposes its furious course....), a white bed in the same part of the world four years later and then this: waking at four, always four and a beam of moonlight shining in the only strip of window not covered by curtain. Shining on the blue sea, blue moonlight. I'll get the moon for you, he had said, and he pulled the curtains to there right before love (touch), and then sleep, and waking at four, always four and there it was, and you (I) stood there in a black nightgown bathed in blue.

To me it seems that all sciences are vain and full of errors that are not born of Experience, mother of all certainty, and that are not tested by Experience; that is to say, that do not at their origin, middle or end, pass through any of the five senses. For if we are doubtful about the certainty of things that pass through the senses how much more should we question the many things against which these senses rebel, such as the nature of god and the soul and the like, about which there are endless disputes and controversies.

There's a little blue book by the side of the bed of the woman who cared for me like a mother, a little book of selections from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, and I open it to Flight, to Structure of Birds' Wings, to You will study the anatomy of the wings of a bird together with the muscles of the breast which are the movers of these wings. And you do the same for man in order to show the possibility that there is in man to sustain himself amid the air by the flapping of wings. And what are the chances of this, of reading of birds and whales and blue and flight written in the 16th century?

Impetus is the impression of local movement transmitted from the mover to the movable thing and maintained by the air or by the water as they move in order to prevent the vacuum. (Movement Through Wind and Water)

The body of anything whatsoever that takes nourishment continually dies and is continually renewed; because nourishment can only enter in those places where the preceding nourishment is exhausted, and if it is exhausted it no longer has life. (Life of the Body)

Rain on Dead Grass

As Denise says, "People take lots of photos of the rain in Los Angeles."

I left the sunny, warm Pacific Northwest and arrived home to the rainy, humid shitty. That's a photo of our back yard. We've let the grass die and plan on replacing it with drought-tolerant stuff. I'll make a couple dozen cupcakes for you if you design something for me because my creativity just doesn't extend to landscape design. I'm thinking a fire pit, some seating, maybe a meditation garden/labyrinth and a lap pool. Just kidding on the lap pool. The rain is nice, though, and today when I went to Trader Joe's, that's all anyone was talking about. As they stacked the avocados, two guys talked about the awesome thunder we all heard this morning, and pretty much everyone commented on how exciting it is to see water fall from the sky.

I'm finished unpacking and re-entrying. It's going well. I've only raised my voice once and badgered The Brothers over and over when they flew the small drone I had purchased for them outside before they'd gotten skilled at it, like I told them to, and it got stuck up in a tree. They connected about four long poles, broomsticks, lacrosse sticks and flagpoles together with duct tape, along with a citrus picker and managed to get the drone down, but the protective cage is still up in the sycamore. After raising my voice and badgering them, over and over, they informed me that it'll come down, Mom, in the fall.
My three weeks in the Hedgebrook wilderness have evidently changed me, though, because that response was adequate, I shrugged my shoulders and went back inside to read some more.

You know how when I got there it felt like I was hallucinating? After three weeks of solitude, intense writing, dreaming, walking, conversing with amazing women and having nearly every need met by the staff, I might be permanently stoned.