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A Slight Detour on The Road to Promise
Today marks the end of an era in several ways: it's the final flourish for #LetsBlogOff and the final post (for a while, at least) for The Road to Promise. You can read why Paul and Gerard have decided to cease the bi-monthly blogging phenomenon here. I've decided it's time to try to publish The Road to Promise in book-form so I'll be putting my energies into a book proposal for the foreseeable future. I would like to express gratitude to everyone who has visited this blog for the past several years, and to thank Paul and Gerard for giving us an exciting forum on which to exchange writing and ideas. Wish me luck, would you? I'll let everyone know if I manage to snag a book deal; until then, best of luck to everyone in their life/work endeavors...
No Power In a Square
The snazziest party spot in Wagner on any given Saturday night was the local VFW, where you could chow down on juicy prime rib and dance the polka until you were ready to drop. Elmo was as patriotic as any of his fellow Wagnerites, hanging out at the VFW with that sheepish look on his face, which told anyone who knew him that a joke was on the tip of his tongue. Despite this easy-going demeanor, he also made it clear that he believed the government had ruined his people by handing out money instead of making them work. He remarked that each administration seemed to grow worse, as if each President was trying to outdo the one before him in what Elmo considered to be unwise practices.
I had come across a quote in Ian Frazier’s Great Plains stating that William T. Sherman, then General-in-Chief of the Army, maintained the government’s plan was to remove all Native Americans, who were being divided and forced onto reservations at the time, to a safe place and reduce them to a helpless condition. Maybe the dole did continue to encourage dependency, but the condition was forced upon them by what Mary Crow Dog called an "alien, more powerful culture."
With late autumn, our spate of trips bringing volunteers to South Dakota had ended so we had moved from our little house to the Sleepy Pine Motel because it would be just the two of us during the dreary winter months. I immediately felt the stricture of having only one small, high window after having had greater access to the prairie sky and its abundance of light through the ample windows in the house. I had been reading about the transitional period from the camp circle days to “acculturation” and had learned that Spotted Tail had disliked the mansion the government had built for him so he had moved back to a nearby camp and installed each of his wives in their own tipis. The conical tents were cooler in the summer than houses without air conditioning had been. This was one of the reasons Native Americans gave when explaining why they’d had a difficult time transitioning from the round structure to the square one. Black Elk had remarked that residing in the first log houses built on the reservations was "a bad way to live.” He declared, “There can be no power in a square."
Elmo's sister Edna had become quite affronted by my regurgitations of the long ago, displaying a frustration which ran counter to her normally serene personality when I repeated some anecdote I'd gleaned from a book. She seemed to be growing weary of my ramblings about the larger-than-life “Indians” who had roamed the surrounding prairie before the coming of wasichu. These personae often seemed more alive to me than the people I saw going through the motions of life on the reservation. When I asked her if she had ever slept in a tipi, she adopted an unusually sarcastic tone, telling me in no uncertain terms that she thought the people who claimed they wanted to return to the old ways were ridiculous. "I'd like to see how long they would last without their carpeting, their heating and their air conditioning," she retorted; “much less how they’d feel about giving up their televisions.”
Edna was one of the Native Americans who held no grief over the passing of their former ways of life. She credited her mother for her advocacy of the Episcopal Church, saying it was easy for her to be faithful to her religion—to try to protect it as it was—because she could remember the devotion her mother had displayed when she walked to church every Sunday, even trudging through deep snow to get there. "I think about always following those footsteps," she remarked, her pensive look illustrating how much she missed her mom.
But there were those who said they'd grown tired of what they saw as empty promises made by Christianity, which they believed had only given lip-service to equality. I felt as torn as the culture I was interacting with as I straddled the past and the present. A powwow at the middle school brought a great surge of emotions when I heard the wailing and the drumbeats of the native music for the first time. Watching the sun glinting from the thimbles on the jingle dancers' costumes, I longed for a flash of emotional clarity; one that would show me whether I had a right to the grief I felt, as this was not my history to mourn.
It was then I came to realize it was my own internal pain being reflected back to me, not theirs, causing me grief. The history of oppression that had deposited trauma in these people echoed a milder incidence of oppression in my own life. But I had been choosing to focus on the external chaos around me—fixating on them rather than on my own feelings of despair. It was true that for the luck of the draw, I could have been the Native American woman slumped over on the curb a few feet away, clutching the empty bottle of booze and her tattered dignity. But this was not my path, as much as I wrongly identified with her pain.
These realizations were confusing ones, and I struggled to keep fear from overriding my admiration for how they held their lives together. After all, it must have required a great deal of strength and courage to face each new day knowing what was ahead in the way of poverty, racism and turmoil.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
Mniwakan Wacipi
After a 2pm session with Davelyn, Jim and I headed to the airport for a particularly long trek to South Dakota, which took us through Memphis and Minneapolis where we landed at midnight, rented a car and drove to Wagner. I’d had a tough time staying awake as we cut through the drenching dark of farmland on the furrowed lip of the Great Plains.
Knowing the connection-heavy time in South Dakota was going to take up a great deal of energy, I had been feeling desperate to get back into my writing. The most stimulating attempt I had managed was reading an essay by Tom Wolfe in Harpers titled “Stalking the Billion-footed Beast” on the plane between Memphis and Minneapolis. In it he declared the realistic novel a form that wallows enthusiastically in the dirt of everyday life and the dirty secrets of class envy. “Dickens, Dostoyevski, Balzac, Zola and Sinclair Lewis assumed that the novelist had to go beyond his personal experience and head out into society as a reporter,” he wrote. “Zola called it documentation, and his documenting expeditions to the slums, coal mines, the races, the folies, department stores, wholesale food markets, newspaper offices, barnyards, railroad yards, and engine decks, notebook and pen in hand, became legendary.”
It was Zola who coined my favorite declaration, “If you asked me what I came into this world to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.” Oh if I could only figure out how I might do this, I thought; realizing I had been so stymied I was frozen in time and doomed to silence. We had pulled up to the little house in Wagner in the wee hours of the morning. Ragged and drained, I had given Sam a drink of water and fallen into bed. Jim was out the door early in the morning, hoping to catch up with Elmo and Rocky at the Spot Café. I turned on the television to see the horror that everyone else was seeing: a massive earthquake had devastated San Francisco. “A quiet crunch” is how one woman described the falling buildings. I marveled at the highway system in the images—buckled and broken into sections, and tossed around, the roads in some parts of the city looked like pieces of a toy racetrack scattered haphazardly or left in a heap of disarray. One of the earthquake survivors said, “Almost nothing could blow me down now that I’ve been through this. I’ve survived and I have a different perspective: I’ll now just have to start over and find my purpose.”
My foundations were crumbling, but I was not certain it was a quiet crunch. Not so unlike those who had to find ways to rebuild on the West Coast, I was starting over—beginning to build a self that I hoped could withstand the life I was living. I’d turned to M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled in order to understand character disorder, as I had learned it was my diagnosis. As I was reading about what created this condition, it occurred to me that the government (the controlling parent) had created a nation of character-disordered children, not just with the non-assimilated Native Americans on reservations but in white culture within America’s borders, as well.
“Who are you?” Davelyn had asked during the session just before we had left town. This should have been such a simple question to answer but for the life of me, I couldn’t. When I wasn’t able to give her anything concrete, she pressed, “Put your observer to work; tell me what you like and dislike, even if it’s trivial.” The only thing I could come up with was how good it felt to be smart. Later that day, I realized I had likely said this because Jim had mentioned in conversation the night before how proud he was of my intelligence. How was it that I needed my husband to give me the words for a self I should have known innately?
With each passing day, the excitement of those who would worship in Woniya Wakan grew exponentially. With the foundation, walls and roof in place, I was called upon to begin cleaning the one-hundred-year-old stained glass panels we had painstakingly lifted from Holy Fellowship. On one rare afternoon when the saws and hammers were quiet, the door's slamming reverberated, jarring me from concentration. I was alone on the jobsite as a Native American man approached my worktable, his unsteady advance alarming me because it seemed he was ready to topple with every faltering step he took. I feared for my own safety and for his—feeling uneasy at the thought that his head would hit the concrete floor if he stumbled, but dreading even more my own vulnerability if he remained upright.
Reaching the table, he clumsily leaned onto its edge, extending one hand toward me with the dirt-streaked palm turned upward. He swayed there for a few seconds then muttered, “Please.” His breath was sour and runnels of mucus caked his upper lip in varying stages of viscosity. He had entered this building because he wanted to be saved, but he didn’t come seeking Jesus, who extended one hand toward him from the panels of glass spread across my worktable. He came to beg for money with which to buy mniwakan wacipi—liquor—as he knew the fiery liquid would stop the trembling that was heaving the foundation of his existence, a solace the concept of Jesus couldn’t possibly offer him in his desperate state of mind.
I was seeing this disintegration of the Native American psyche with regularity by merely walking down the street. The mornings had grown cold and my body shivered as I made my way to the jobsite, thinking about how late-summer seemed to have suddenly fled, leaving autumn's crisp breath in its wake. When I approached the church, I noticed the chill was no deterrent to a Native American man sleeping on the sidewalk. He leaned against a street marker—his back slumped and his chin on his chest—with one knee pointing skyward and the other leg splaying awkwardly in the opposite direction. He remained in the same spot when I passed again at mid-morning, this time on my way to the hardware store. An assemblage of dogs had gathered around him as if wanting to keep him company. A particularly scruffy one, large and black, muzzled the face of the barely conscious man, who had just enough consciousness to shoo him with a wave of his hand. When a few passes of his palm did nothing, he gave up, slumping deeper into his stupor.
The rays of the afternoon sun had strengthened when I passed on my way to the Spot for a short break later in the day. The drunk man still hadn’t moved, and the dogs had stayed with him in spite of the increasing heat, many of them panting in an effort to stay cool. As the day drew to a close, I left the church to head home and even as dusk’s shadows signaled night’s progression, he remained in the same position—the large black dog his only companion. Did the canine feel akin to this man, who seemed to have lost his ability to desire comfort, or was it feeling protective of someone who no longer seemed to have the capacity to care for himself?
The whites in Wagner had seen so much of this descent into an inebriated abyss that it seemed to have created loathing. I had seen the distasteful looks on the faces of the town's upstanding citizens when they passed an intoxicated Native American. Did seeing them activate their own fear, one that whispered they, too, would become victims of a life leaving only one mode of escape if they didn’t reject the behavior wholesale? The cultural breach was as wide as the oceans; the liquor was equally deep and just as unfathomable. This was indeed the edge of the world as far as I could tell, beyond which no man (or woman) survived without being forever scathed.
I could understand why those outside the Native American culture would assume their struggles were due to weakness, as I was harboring my own measure of judgment. But shouldn't we at least try to view what was happening to those who slipped into the chasm of hopelessness through a lens of compassion? If we did, maybe we wouldn’t be so quick to declare their culture a failure; would find a way to break the cycle of prejudice that had begun with the momentous arrival of Columbus, who had pompously assured the natives he had come from heaven. He had written in his log that he believed the Native Americans he found could easily be made Christians because they seemed to have no religion. If only this beginning could have been rewritten! In fact, I longed for a different start but as far as I could tell no one had created a pen with enough power to reach that far back into history; or, if they did, no one seemed to care enough to set its nib in motion…
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks again for stopping in!
Today’s post is a Let’s Blog Off sound-off, the theme of which is “The edge of your world.” To see the tipping point for the other LBO participants, click here for an ever-growing roster.
The Voice Which Calls
Elmo and Edna continued to surprise me as I grew to know the brother and sister better. We’d invited them to dinner one evening, and as I spooned a generous helping of the chicken casserole I’d made onto her plate, Edna said, “We were poor when we were growing up; we would go weeks without a dollar in the house. Even so, mother told me to always give something—whether it was something I’d made or as little as a penny. She said it wasn’t the amount you gave, it was how you gave it.”
Like Edna, Betty Zephier, had been telling me her life story. Her ancestry was a mix of Chickasaw and Choctaw she said one afternoon as we visited over cups of coffee. She was making me a morning star quilt and sewing a war eagle quilt for Jim. I’d never seen hand-work as perfect as hers—and that was saying something because both of my grandmothers, who’d quilted their entire adult lives, would have fawned over the remarkable artistry of the tall, beautiful woman with swarthy skin. Her profile was sharp, and her jet-black hair—lightly teased and combed back from her prominent forehead—gave her a regal appearance in spite of a pronounced shyness in her mannerisms.
As I was studying Betty’s features in an effort to remember her well enough to write them down, Faith Spotted Eagle walked into the Spot Café and approached our table. I had been told that Faith was one of the parishioners whose views bordered on activism, a fact that was proven during many of our conversations as she lamented how history had played out. After greeting us in her gentle but determined way she joined us, telling us about a trip she had taken to Greenwood with her husband the week before. They had traveled there to fish from the Missouri River, she explained, and as the sky had darkened to night, hundreds of fireflies set the river aglow. She said there was an eerie quiet and stillness to the evening, and it made her feel as if she had been touched by the spirits of all those who had been there before them. This was an example of how alive a nature-based spirituality remained in the culture of these thoughtful people.
I had watched a National Georgraphic special on PBS the night before she related this story to me, and the program had fascinated me because it explored the different sites of ancient cultures in the Americas. Archaeologists had explained some of their findings, and the narrators of the show were animated with excitement and respect for these ancient peoples. Why is it, I wondered, that there is still scorn for the ways of the plains Indians? Why didn’t they deserve the same respect as the Anasazi and the Navajos? I could certainly understand there was a difference in temperament involved—the plains Indians being warring tribes whereas the desert Indians were peaceful—but the prejudices I’d seen made it clear that our world was permeated with double standards.
As I pondered questions like these, Jim and I moved between the disparate worlds we occupied. In fact, life seemed a logistical nightmare at times. We had arrived in Tennessee to find it rainy and dreary—Bridal Veil Falls was flush with rain as I sat like a purring fat cat on the screened porch. It was almost impossible to believe that anyone in the world could be unhappy at that very moment. Then, I remembered the children and alcoholics of the housing community on the Yankton, those struggling to make sense of life on the Gaza Strip, the massacres of China’s Tiananmen Square and the damage being done by Colombia’s drug cartel. Measured against the drippy grayness I looked out upon, these flashing realizations brought my morning into paradox.
As the thoughts of South Dakota intruded, I wondered, How could you possibly approach the subject of alcoholism with a people who seemed to use it as their only means of escape from oppression but for whom it was said liquor’s deadly grip was physiological? I had picked up the habit of thinking of such things rather than pondering my own plight, which was becoming clearer as I continued the painful process of seeking healing. I was in therapy again—this time in earnest and with a new therapist, Davelyn, whom I sensed was going to help me figure out why I was struggling so, something that had been so long in coming. I felt she would not be one to give lip-service to my pain; rather she seemed determined to help me name it and understand where its sourced resided within my psyche. I longed to become a whole person; felt this process would help me to find a rich writer’s voice, not the thin, puny one I was using just to get by.
Somehow, I think she understood how desperately I wanted to save my own life. I’m not sure she knew how important writing would be to my survival, as I didn’t yet understand that piece of the puzzle myself because my desire to reach great depths with my words—to offer something to humanity—was just budding. I guess this fact did prove I had a mission after all, but mine was one with a selfish purpose at its core—shoring myself up as the world swirled around me and finding a voice that would be strong enough to leave something meaningful to the world. I was growing to despise the title “missionary.” Jim could call himself anything he wanted, but I was not at all comfortable with that albatross around my neck. I was becoming less ashamed of my struggle, but I also wondered if those who might read my work someday would feel as if they were drinking great cups of sadness—like giant mugs of espresso, the bitterness hard to take after the first few sips.
I wondered why I even bothered to write such darkness down. As this forlorn thought popped into my head, the sun emerged, igniting the trees as if they were suddenly wearing jewels—the droplets of water dancing on their leaves turning to prisms as the wind nudged them into the light. In her early diary, Anaïs Nin wrote nearly 70 years before that moment of luminosity, “I long to write. I feel that if I were left alone for a long time, I could do something; I could discover the source of the voice which calls me night and day. I wish for tranquility, for solitude.” I felt a great surge of emotion welling in my throat as I read her words. If she was to be believed, my struggle wasn’t as unnecessary as Jim and our priest contended, the two colluding to “pull me out” of my self-absorbed wallowing. Nin went on to say, “somehow, even as an old maid, an author, an unnoticed individual, I am going to be useful and do something worthwhile during my life.” The word “worthwhile” traveled through the corridors of my mind, and I marveled at how closely I felt her struggle resembled mine when she declared, “the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Was this time approaching for me? Or would the compressed bloom of my desire to express myself wither and fall from the stem of my life before I had the courage to turn my face toward the light?
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
This post is a participating entry in today’s #LetsBlogOff, the theme of which is “a favorite flower story.” I was the flower at the point in my life when the above snippet of my story took place. How pretty the bud of my struggling self appeared (or not), I will leave for my biographers to decide. All I knew is that I kept hoping beyond hope that at some point in time, the sun would shine brightly on me so I could bloom in my own way. I have survived and I open my face to the sunlight as often as I can remember to do so in the fast-paced world of my life as it is today. This post is a celebration of talented therapists like Davelyn—the first to show me what it meant to keep my petals intact even when life’s ferocious winds buffeted me from all sides.
The Heavens Cannot Contain You
Emily Dickenson wrote, “You cannot fold a Flood—/ And put it in a Drawer.” As I left Costa Rica behind and became more entrenched in South Dakota, I felt this was my task as I labored to make sense of the impressions and feelings I’d been gathering during our work in the mission field. The church in Greenwood was haunting me a bit because removing the stained glass windows had made me feel as if I had marred its historic beauty.
In her account of the Church of Holy Fellowship in That They May Have Life, Sneve states the little chapel was first built in August 1870 from logs gathered by the Native Americans who wanted a church on their reservation. In 1873, W. Hobart Hare, then Bishop of the newly created Missionary Jurisdiction of Niobrara, arrived at Yankton Mission and chose the church for his cathedral, making his home in a small room built onto its side.
The frame structure as we found it in 1989 was not the original; it wasn’t concecrated until 1886, a little over one hundred and three years prior to my setting foot within its interior. One of the things I enjoyed about the history of the Native Americans I was reading was their embracing of their own brand of mythology, something they seemed to do as naturally as any culture since the ancient Greeks. In fact, they were steeped in their version of it before the wasichu, white perople, came along and tried to snuff it out of them. In Yankton, one of the earliest bits of folklore relating to the Episcopal Church and its entrée into Sioux society was the story of the conversion of Tipi Sapa, then the chief of the Yanktonai whose name in Dakota meant Black Lodge. Once “Christianized,” Tipi Sapa had been given the name Philip Deloria, and was lauded as “the best known of all the native priests.”
Sneve tells the story of the day his interest in the church was first recorded. Tipi Sapa rode by the chapel in full war regalia when he heard the congregation singing “Guide Me Thou Great Jehovah” in Dakota, stopping for a brief time to listen to the words. He didn’t enter the chapel at that time but returned another day to hear the same hymn being sung. It is said the words of the hymn made a great impression on the young chief, a response that eventually led him to approach Bishop Hare about becoming a Christian. When the bishop told him he must give up his chief’s position, cut his hair and become a simple man, he balked, stating he was a powerful chief. He did eventually agree to be baptized, and was sent to Shattuck Military School for the beginning of the inculturation process. After completing the educational and service requirements to enter the priesthood, he was ordained a deacon at St. Stephen’s chapel on the Cheyenne River reservation, then spent forty years on the Standing Rock reservation as a priest, returning to the Yankton reservation in 1925. His story expanded beyond Native American culture when his visage was placed in the reredos of the high altar in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.—one of only three Americans among the 98 “Saints of the Ages.”
My stewing about the abandoned chapel in Greenwood was the counter opposite to how the parishioners were feeling. I could have taken a cue from my grandmother, who loved to say the more you stirred shit, the worse it smelled but I couldn’t let go of my disgust over how the church had treated Native Americans in the past. My viewpoint was not shared by the Wagner congregation whose excitement had reached a fever pitch by the day Bishop Anderson was visiting for the groundbreaking. Just before his closing comments for the ceremony that day, the Bishop read a prayer: “Oh Lord God of Israel, the heavens cannot contain you, yet you are pleased to dwell in the midst of your people, and have moved us to set apart a space on which to build a house of prayer: accept and bless the work which we have now begun, that it may be brought to completion, to the honor and glory of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”
He then remarked how the great spirit had waffled through the framed shell of a building we had been standing within, the studded walls surrounding a rough concrete slab foundation still fully open to the elements. “The heavens cannot contain you,” he said, raising his hands to let the wind stir the papers he held. I thought this was a fitting statement considering how the strong breezes had fluttered our clothing and programs throughout the entire service. The pages of the Bibles the lay readers had been holding danced as if in a ceremony of their own as the men tried to keep their places. Finally, the Bishop ended his closing statements by declaring the wind was indeed the spirit, or breath, of the “word,” because it had joined in the celebration of a new beginning for the Church of the Holy Spirit.
Father Hobbs, who led the congregation, had spoken of miracles during the service, his list including the $55,000 grant from the United Thank Offering, the construction knowledge Jim brought to the project, and the free labor given by all the volunteers who traveled with us from Chattanooga. “The miracle of this spirit of volunteerism will allow the church to be debt free,” he said: “a luxury, yet a necessity in the life of this small parish.”
A feeling of pride that we had brought something of value to a group of people who’d rarely caught breaks in our country was battling it out with my feelings of regret. Would our hymns sung in English have drawn Tipi Sapa in if he’d rode by on horseback today? I questioned. The only answer was the breeze stirring the skirt I’d worn, the fabric whipping into a frenzy as the Bishop walked over to shake Jim’s hand. The silence of the undulant air provided no answer as I smiled and tried to appear gracious while my emotions buffeted my heaving mind. Where would this turmoil lead me? I wondered as the Bishop embraced me in a gentle hug.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
This is a participating post in Let's Blog Off. To see how my blogging compatriots chose to answer how the preceding generations had made an impact on their lives, click here.
The Depository of Arrogance
We drove the long stretch of road cutting through miles of farmland and ranchland between Wagner and Greenwood, home to Peter Cook who often brought lovely beaded jewelry and barrettes he created to church to sell afterwards. His beadwork was as impressive as his baking abilities, as I had experienced by relishing his incredible apple pies. We were there to remove several stained glass windows from the Church of the Holy Fellowship, one of three abandoned chapels set like unpolished crystals on the ragged banks flanking the Missouri River. I walked along the moist earth wondering how much money had been spent on the reservations trying to bridge a cultural gap that couldn’t possibly be spanned with money.
The Episcopal congregations had been dwindling for a while because the seniors, who made up the bulk of the worshipers, were dying away. Maybe it had always been inevitable that these churches, monuments to a foreign deity, would become empty laboratories of coercion, their experiments doomed to fail. After all, how much clout could a religion sustain when it replaced a spirituality vitally alive each and every day with a building staying locked more often than it remained open?
With the decreased activity caused by so many defections into Wagner, the neighborhood now languished with only an occasional dog's barking to interrupt the quietude. It saddened me to add to the decline of this spot, which once saw the dockage of paddleboats as they stopped on their way along the pre-dammed Missouri during the rowdy days of the westward expansion. The new church in Wagner—soon to be consecrated the Church of the Holy Spirit or Woniya Wakan—would only sentence Holy Fellowship to further decline.
Truth be told, the church had fallen silent long before we came to build a new one. Rather than hold services embraced by the warm patina of the wooden pews and the gentle ambiance of the clapboard chapel, the parishioners of Holy Fellowship had been worshiping in a community center next to the empty lot where Woniya Wakan would stand. The center was an institutional prototype: impersonal, cold and bland. The floor was irrevocably dirty—a fact the swarming flies seemed to appreciate—and the tic-tic-tic of the overhead fan kept the silence company between liturgy, prayer and song.
I loved singing hymns in Dakota. I struggled through the breathy language, appreciating the rhythmical intonations, the nuance of sound, the inflections. But I grew to dread the Bible readings. As soon as I took my seat in one of the rickety metal folding chairs, I’d scan the handouts holding the Collect, the Psalm and the readings to see if what was printed there was disdainful given the events of the past 150 years, as it happened more often than not. We read the Collect in unison: "Remember those who are ill treated, since you also are in the body." How insulting that these Native Americans were being told to remember what we had long ignored. The prayers were no less disturbing to me: "Guide the people of this land, and of all the nations, in the ways of justice and peace, that we may honor one another and serve the common good."
I found it ironic that I had been embracing a religion which professed to bring justice to people when the rights of the Native Americans had been completely disregarded early on. I left these services in a confused daze, wanting to apologize, yet not fully understanding why I was compelled to say I was sorry. Forgive us for we surely knew not what we were doing, I silently begged. But the resigned awareness I sought would not hold. By examining a more honest account of history than the one I had been presented when I was a student in the public school system, I was now learning that those who were in power during the colonization of America did indeed know what they were doing, as cultural annihilation was sanctioned by both the government and the church.
The push to save the "heathen" souls had resulted in an evangelical frenzy which brought both the Catholics and the Episcopalians to Indian Territory. When asked to select the "official" religion on the reservations, the Native Americans chose the Episcopal faith because its priests wore white cassocks. The Catholics wore similar robes; only theirs were black. Good triumphing over evil? Cruelty is cruelty, regardless of the color in which it veils itself, I fumed as I read about the abuses these clergy members brought with them.
The mission schools, irrespective of the denomination, seemed to be the worst offenders. Stories of priests punishing Native American children for speaking their own language at school were plentiful. One man, who was caught speaking Lakota as a boy, remembered when a priest took him out of the lunch line at the mission school where he was forced to board, pulling him to a boiling pot on the stove where he held the boy's hand to the searing metal in order to “teach him a lesson.” How could I feel good about being associated with the Christian faith when stories like this left me horrified? I sat and silently pled with the Native Americans in the church services to stop dutifully listening to liturgy that had been rendered empty by these abominations but I couldn’t know what battles had been fought by them and lost, nor could I understand what comfort might have been gained by this supplication each week.
And wasn't my attitude just as arrogant as the stance of those who had come to conquer rather than to respect? Was I not simply one more white person attempting to impose my will upon them? It was certainly, at the very least, a variation on the same theme, which reared its ugly head when any of us outside their culture asked, How can we solve their problems? This one seemingly meaningful question, I believe, had done irreparable harm. Why add one more ounce of condescension to the depository of arrogance? I asked myself.
Though it was difficult not to question how things could have been righted when witnessing the level of dysfunction resulting from the collision and the haphazard amalgamation of two disparate cultures, I would have to hold myself accountable by remembering I didn’t have the answers to the unruly questions presenting themselves at every turn. I often wondered what change I could have inspired had I been able to turn back time: might I have had a positive influence on history? It was a ridiculous exercise, of course, because those days when consideration could have steered Native Americans to a more powerful position in our society were far in the past. All I could possibly do was to try and make my own peace with how things had been handled. But how?
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
This is a participating post in Let’s Blog Off, the subject today being “If I could turn back time…” To see the full roster of bloggers who are riffing on the subject, click here.
Land of the Free
Once we had exited the Rockies, driving from Steamboat Springs to Wagner, South Dakota, was a lesson in monotony, the Plains stretching into oblivion as we struck a straight coarse on the shaft of asphault that ran right up to the horizon. We passed over so many dried creek beds, I wondered how anything could survive on the sun-scoured expanse of brittle grasses. Old Woman Creek had packed up and gone, leaving behind a scattering of brittle bones and the splintered scaps of cottonwood limbs begging for rain while the sky refrained.
The first elevation relief came as we neared the border between Wyoming and South Dakota in the form of the Black Hills. They were being pounded by a scowling storm, visible from as far away as Newcastle—its cloud-choked head feathering heavenward and its dark heart bearing down on the outer edge of the hills. The closer we drew, the angrier it seemed, I thought, and I was right: once we reached its proximity, we were pounded with hail so thick we could hardly see to drive. At one point, we were barely advancing as quarter-inch-sized balls of ice blanketed the ground an inch and a half deep.
I was thankful we were in such a macho vehicle—the old Bronco had seen much worse having been through four college-age boys in succession as Jim passed it from one son to another and had weathered a decade of being kicked around by the partying set that took over Steamboat each winter. Though it never shrugged, the sound of ice striking the thin metal of its hood and roof was deafening at times. I’d had kinder welcomes but in spite of the weather’s tantrum, I decided I wanted to return to the Black Hills someday because it was where the Native Americans believed nature had the most amplified spiritual voice. She had certainly been exercising it that day as we drove past tourist traps and tacky intrusions on a gorgeous backdrop of jagged peaks covered in the verdant thickness of pines reaching high into the sky.
Once past the Hills, the flatness of the land returned until we reached the Badlands, an incredibly bleak and frightening landscape if there ever was one. It was as if the earth was eating itself, and the bleached-out, bone-dry colors were the counter opposites to the Black Hills’ lush infusion of blue-greens and deep grays. I wondered how quickly it took the Badlands to change as plateaus and buttes melted away, then formed again as the edge of the grasslands caved in on itself. Is anything ever constant here or is this a treacherous world of continual dissolving? I wondered.
We skirted the Buffalo Gap Grasslands to see its buxom namesakes grazing—some in pairs and others wandering the expanses in small groups. The first prairie dogs came into view as we dipped a bit further into the park, their “Prairie Dog Town” a field of dirt mounds, some of which had the straight-backed homeowners themselves popping up from within as they haughtily surveyed us from their tunneled residences.
It felt as if it had taken weeks for us to make our way to Wagner, though it had been only a day and a half. When we arrived, we were greeted by the stalwart parishioners of the tiny town, and it wasn’t long before one stood out. We parked the Bronco at the house Jim had rented and made our way to the community center where we were being honored with a dinner, and I knew immediately who was going to be Jim’s favorite among our new friends. The minute we entered the open room, Elmo’s booming voice and thin cackling laugh, which shook his large girth, welcomed us, not once letting up during the entire evening.
He reminded me of an overstuffed teddy bear with its ears torn off because his head was shaved and his jowls were so pronounced, his tiny ears seemed tucked away behind the protruding cheeks. He wore baggy pants that had never been “in fashion,” the thick suspenders holding them up smudged where he would fiddle with them as he pontificated about one subject or another. His smile was so endearing to me because it reminded me of my grandmother’s when she was soaking her false teeth at night—the indented oblong of his big grin hiding his lips as if for safekeeping.
His eyes were perpetually twinkling because he was always thinking of his next joke or a riff he could interject into any conversation, whether it was actually fitting or not. That night, he pulled a leather pouch from his pocket. It was darkened and worn smooth from being handled innumerable times. He held it in front of him and paused for effect, finally saying with a drawl, “Well, lookie here!” As he said it, he slowly pulled a fly from its interior, which prompted Jim to ask, “Do you fish?”
Elmo answered, “Not anymore; but if I got stranded on the river somewhere I could catch my dinner!” He broke into a hearty laugh at his own joke, the only thing making it funny besides the fact he’d not likely been on a river in decades. As evidenced by his portliness, he did like to eat. “My Grandpa told me to always get a look at the cook before I eat at a restaurant,” he said that night. “He told me, ‘If the cook is skinny, don’t eat there; fat, jolly cooks mean a good meal because they constantly sample their own cooking!’” He referred to himself as a Siouxwegian because his ancestry was a mix of Sioux and Norwegian. When he explained this to me, he slapped his knee and shook his head as he sniggered, seeming so particularly amused he must have been hearing the fact for the first time, though that was not the case.
I couldn’t help but giggle myself as I scribbled my impressions of Elmo into my writer’s notebook on the flight home—a 12-hour journey that left me feeling exhausted but happy to see Sam after nine days away from him. I had picked up a number of books in South Dakota, among them Custer Died For Your Sins by Vine Deloria, Jr. It was a scathing book aimed at white culture but the chapter about the Native American sense of humor gave me extra insight into Elmo’s personality. I was working my way through the tough material during mornings on the screened porch—feeling my skin burn with shame that a people’s civil rights were still being breached in our country, especially since we were so fond of proclaiming we were the land of the free. I was receiving a painful education as to the ways of the world, the ways of our government and the ways of ugly racism.
I found myself wondering time and again why these weren’t the stories we were taught in school: why did our lessons stop after the Pilgrims and the Indians shared that supposed meal on that first Thanksgiving? Should it still be looked upon as such a thankful day? I questioned, closing Deloria’s book and wondering what other inconsistencies were about to come to the fore. According to the history books, the Native Americans gave their best to the Pilgrims who’d made their entrée into their world during that lauded celebratory meal, and I had just experienced the same level of generosity during a dinner in Wagner when a group of Native Americans who had so little to give provided us with a delicious and heartfelt experience.
I had been told that many Sioux took the rations they received from the government—cheese, sugar, flour and butter, for instance—to the dump and tossed them into the trash to make a point. Peter Cook was not one of those. He brought several of the most magnificent apple pies I’d ever seen or tasted to that dinner. As I watched his face gleam with pride when Jim relished his first bite, I thought about how very different history could have been. If only I could rewrite it, I’d include a great deal more true “thanks giving” and a lot less fanfare.
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This is a Let’s Blog Off post; to see the other bloggers’ plats du jour, click here.
Primal Decorum
As we winged our way west toward Steamboat Springs, I was reading an article in Harper’s by Paul West titled “My Body, Myself.” In it he wrote, “I had always had a sense of being intimately linked with stuff that I was not—if indeed I knew where I began and stuff left off.” He deemed his sense of connection a “primitive hunch,” adding, “…I began to think of myself in the third person but I was too blurred even to maintain the consistency of that primal decorum…”
I felt I knew what he meant when he said, “I hovered,” as I sat in a high-backed seat, floating through the sky on my way to yet one more destination with which I had no permanent relationship. I was thrilled that the particular spot I would be visiting was at least one of my favorites. I had never been to Colorado in the summer so I was eager to see the difference warmth brought to the town I’d only known when its bowl of a valley ringed with jagged peaks was filled with white powder.
Our first morning there, I opened the curtains to find a black cat with glowing golden eyes watching the thickets that bristled at the hem of the woods. As I pulled the curtains back further, its eyes swung my way, focusing on me as its body tensed, its crouch deepening as if it were readying to spring away. When I didn’t move, the feline turned its gaze toward the half-empty birdfeeder and studied it with intense interest. I wasn’t in the mood to see a bird or a chipmunk mauled on that particular morning so I slid the door open a bit, causing the cat to bolt into the bush, its tail swinging into the thickets as it disappeared.
As soon as it was gone, a chipmunk roused itself from the woodpile in which it had been hiding and unleashed a round of chirping chatter that berated the cool, clean air for its collaboration with the monster that had been stalking it. The louder he chirped, the more frantic his tail flipped behind him—like a conductor’s wand during a particularly stirring segment of a symphony, though his tail’s movement was a delusional testament to his prowess at having warded off the cat! After a final crescendo, he inched his way toward the scattered seeds beneath the bird feeder, keeping one eye on the tree-line just in case, and helped himself to a mouthful of breakfast.
The next brave beings to return were the Stellar’s Jays, and they were closely followed by the magpies—cautious but bossy as they sparred for domination over the birdfeeder. The chipmunk made the mistake of commencing a series of squeals and one of the magpies hopped over to it to give it a piece of its mind. As the bird squawked a refrain, cocking its head sideways to see if its point was being made, the chipmunk backed up a few paces but was far from ready to acquiesce. Its chirping intensified and the Stellar’s Jay scooping feed with its enormous beak rotated its head so its closest eye could see what the ruckus was about. So much drama everywhere in life! I thought as I closed the door on the cacophony.
The bold landscape touched me as much in its summer gentleness as it had in its wintry hush. The rising breath of the breezes stirred the wildflowers and rustled the silvered leaves of the aspens, the bright colors of the flowers superimposed against the pale spotted trunks of the trees seeming to testify that the earth was indeed good. The storms at such a high altitude were no different than they were at home or even at sea level in Panama City Beach, as they swooped in and rubbed out every inch of light in the same manner they behaved in any other landscape. The flat tops of the distant peaks still held drifts of dull snow, as if a great white hope belonged only to their loftiness. The matchstick trunks of the long-dead pines pointed at the heavens as if to accuse the mountains of not seizing the day, their bare bodies—ravaged by borers during the 1940’s—serving as a reminder that death was always just one step behind.
The wilderness threatened to consume me as I rested my head on a burned-out tree trunk and sank into the foliage that softly licked at my skin as the breeze dictated. I listened intently but couldn’t tell whether the rushing stream was involved in a dialogue with the steep hillsides or whether it was simply a soliloquy understood only by its own rippling currents. The babble sang its message to whatever party happened along and I was glad it was performing for me in this idyllic moment in time. The sun came and went, ambivalent toward my desire for warmth, and I celebrated my last lazy day for a while, as I would be attending the Steamboat Springs Writer’s Conference the next day.
I was nervous about meeting other writers and having my work critiqued. My skin had always been so thin when it came to my strung-together sentences, and I turned out the bedside light that night wondering whether I might have grown out of the shyness that had always kept me from connecting with others who might have something to teach me.
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This post is a #LetsBlogOff contribution, the question of the moment being “What do you look for in a Blog Off; or what motivates you to participate or not?” I would like to tell the esteemed leaders of our fearless tribe that I’d prefer less specific topics, ones with broader philosophical implications because these ask me to dig deeper. And, hey: thanks for asking—such a rare show of respect in our fast-paced, communication-rampant world! To see the other posts of the day, click here for the list.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
Drowsy Weather
I had imagined that I would spend my hours during our final trip putting thoughts like this on paper, but I was unable to translate anything into a coherent narrative because Jim had put me to work making stained glass windows for the church and the chaos of being worried that I wouldn’t finish them—anxiety that had me up at 4:30 a.m. and on the site straight through until 7p.m. each day for over a week—had sapped my concentration. I’d finally taken a day off and was sitting in Restaurante Carucy in the center of Siquirres—a welcome relief after days of being on my feet as I bent over a makeshift table cutting glass and soldering lead. Feeling unfettered for the moment, I let my vision sift through the untold number of faded colors and shrunken patterns of worn cotton clothing parading around town on the backs, thighs, buttocks and chests of its boisterous residents. Disco Evan, across the street, was empty after a weekend of the flashing pin lights and blaring music it employed to draw night owls away from the sticky inky air into the more claustrophobic moisture of sweat dripping from bodies that writhed in unison.
I retreated to our rented house in the hopes that I could find some relief from the furnace of midday but there was not one inch of the interiors that offered anything resembling a respite. I sat and watched the movement of the heat radiating from the tin roof of the house next door, a frenzied swirling haze that danced its way toward me, not in the least threatened by the snippet of breeze brushing across my face. I felt the swelter approach and it unapologetically took my shoulders in its grasp as I willed myself to remain still and let it surround me—any movement, after all, would simply have made its embrace far more intense. It passed and I began to breathe again while silently awaiting the next onslaught. What a way to spend an afternoon! I thought, sweat dripping from the tip of my nose onto the book I was trying to read.
I finally gave up as salty moisture seeped into my eyes and blurred my vision. I let my mind wander over the events of the day before when the church we’d built had been dedicated. Jim and I had been given a plaque with our names on it—the misspelling of our last name somewhat comical, and representative of the lack of detail that made Costa Rica so endearing at times and maddening at others. Jim’s emotions got the best of him when he tried to speak, and he’d told me afterwards that he was embarrassed because big, strong guys weren’t supposed to cry. Before all was said and done, he had almost everyone in the Chattanooga contingent in tears. Emma King had asked us to sign her prayer book when the service had come to a close and as I handed it back to her, she patted my hand as she said, “Please don’t forget me.”
As tough as moments like those had been for me, they had been especially emotional for Jim, as he felt he was closing a chapter of his life, one that had represented the beginnings of a dream he’d held since he’d been a little boy. The group of volunteers we had hosted had become completely enamored with the people in the small town, and it was always interesting to me to see how some groups bonded with the locals while others did not. It often depended upon the women who were with us. One of our volunteers, Prestine, had drawn the children in and welcomed their overwhelming affection with joy—Estevan, Manuel, Carol, Jessica, and the others we’d come to know so well were seemingly starved for her attention and not at all shy about demanding it. Her hands were full the entire time she was on the job site each day, and it was obvious that she was thrilled about it.
I had managed to complete the stained glass windows but we had not been able to install them because the government had decided to shut off the electricity in Pocora during our last day there. Jim said he wouldn’t likely make it back to put them in place until the end of the year so we would have to store them in the Diocesan office in San Jose. This meant that Rick and Christy—two of our volunteers—and I ferried them on our laps while Jim drove the undulant roads to the capital. We had to hold the colorful panels upright because the truck bounced so forcefully they would have shattered had they been placed flat in the bed. Balancing them was a tedious task given the amount of movement the curves threw at the small truck as we made our way through the monster mountain range between the Caribbean Coast and San Jose. I paid close attention to the terrain as we slid along, knowing it would likely be my last time to experience the dusky wetness that birthed such lushness along the familiar ribbon of pavement.
It was near twilight when we reached the highest altitude of our journey, the atmosphere made uncommonly bleak by the rainy weather. Trees sprouting orchids dangled them like jewels they were wearing to the opera or like tiny escape ropes lowered from toy helicopters, the blooms deciding they had had enough of their woody perches for the time being. Having made the trip so many times, I recognized the progression from lower elevation foliage to high mountain vegetation, the density of varied hues of green growing from lush to cloying. As we reached the abdomen of the range, giant bulges jutted from towering peaks and one particular type of tree that had always fascinated me came into view. It seemed fragile like a giant maidenhair fern, its limbs covered in clusters of delicate leaves that fanned out like ostrich plumes arranged symmetrically in a vase. They arced skyward then dipped their tips back toward the ground, making me wonder if I’d ever see foliage as abundant again.
We drove through clouds for miles—the soupiness of the air bathing the sleep-filled world in dankness. Drowsy weather, I thought, which made the mountains yawn into their caverns and nestle into their deep valleys for a good night’s sleep. Dark was wrapped fully around us as we drove away from the last tall slope and the city of San Jose came into view, its lights strung like sparkling dewdrops along the maze of a spider’s web that had been spun throughout the valley and up the opposite hillsides.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. If you’ve been following along for a while, you may have noticed I’m not posting as regularly as I have in the past. I’ve launched a new social media consultancy, adroyt, so the mainstay of my energy is going toward building the business as beautifully as we can. I will still be posting here but not likely with great regularity and I would like to express my deepest gratitude for your continued interest in this blog, which has meant and still means a great deal to me.
Lying to Tell the Truth: A #LetsBlogOff Reverie
Jim was racing around with only a week to prepare for his final trip to Costa Rica because he was determined to cram three week’s worth of activities into the seven days he had in town. His meetings with his cronies segued to long lunches at the Mountain City Club; and his determination to taste the best of summer filled our evening and weekend calendar with barbecues, al fresco cocktail parties and boating on Lake Chickamauga.
He would spend a week in Central America before I joined him with six volunteers, and I was up early the morning I took him to the airport, watching as his sunburned head—all that was left of the leisure time he had known—bobbed in and out of view as he heaved the heavy LL Bean duffle bags out the door. I stood at the window admiring the bluff trees, which I knew would envelope me in coolness once I was back from dropping him off because I was determined to park myself on the screened porch for as much of my week of freedom as was possible. I settled myself there the minute I returned, sitting quietly for a few seconds in order to attune myself to the waterfall smattering against the gully of rocks into which it spilled. It seemed that the staccato notes mimicked my lack of output at the typewriter—the tap, tap, tap echoing the stilted rhythm of my creativity gone bone dry, the keys sticking in mid-strike so that the words came out of me in a halting trickle.
I was waiting for an imaginative storm to blow through and leave the ideas cascading from my brain in a torrent but that had not happened in far too long. This made me fear the long summer months ahead, knowing the heat would diminish the waterfall’s voice to a dribble. Would mine be sentenced to the same fate? I wondered. What would it take to get my writing back on track? It was then I realized the sound of that splattering was identical to the noise that falling water made as it splashed into a deep, boxy concrete sink. I closed my eyes and let the sensory memories wash over me as they brought Costa Rica, where I would soon return for the last time, flooding over my senses.
I was still trying to process what I had experienced in South Dakota—a time of controversy, conflicts and extremes. During the convocation, I had felt the need to hang back and remain aloof. I had never met such shy, closed people and I felt there was prejudice against me, though I hardly blamed them because I was just another wasichu. I could only imagine how much deep-seated mistrust had built up in them and I felt sad that there was no unity among tribes because it kept them from moving forward in a way that might have enabled them to assuage some of the despair I had witnessed.
I moved through the days of Jim’s absence with this fretfulness jangling around in me even during the delicious mornings I spent soaking in the beautiful mountain backdrop. The surroundings calmed me as always, but I found that I was so weary it was all I could do to put two sentences together. I kept at it, making false starts as my annoyance at the sound of the heavy equipment cutting the road far below, which sounded downright evil juxtaposed against the soft spraying of the waterfall, edged out the faint momentum that offered itself to me. This must have been the same sound the people who lived near the strip mining operations heard when the ruination of certain parts of the Appalachian Mountains came to pass, I thought. Oh, why do I care? I am a peace here, and I wish I could sit like this for the rest of my days!
I had seen the play “Steel Magnolias” with friends and found myself wishing I could capture the eccentricities of the southern character as brilliantly as Robert Harling had. The only other time I had been as enamored with the authentic rendering of the eccentric southern personality was when I had seen Beth Henley’s “Crimes of the Heart.” Would I ever get my act together so that I could leave something as forceful to the world?
The Fourth of July dawned and the weather was a deluge. I realized that most people must have been angered by the weather but I was reveling in the fact that I had peace, quiet and every excuse to hole up. The tropical-like downpours had created a snarling waterfall that ravaged slick rocks lit by a queer fog-filtered light—to the point that they glowed, alien-like. Within that odd radiance, hammered silver contrasted shiny green leaves so brilliant they appeared to be made of patent leather.
I’d been reading an article in Harper’s titled “In Deepest Gringolandia.” In it Bob Shacochis declared Mexico was being used as a third-world tourist theme park by North Americans. He wrote, “North Americans, boarding their planes, take North America with them—in varying degrees, yes, ugly or beautiful, but North America nevertheless.” I thought about how uncomfortable some of the places we’d stayed in Costa Rica had been and how I had succumbed to this myself. Being overwhelmed by roaches had certainly thrown me, and living at the mercy of the elements had challenged me to no end. If I was a snob by admitting that being in a clean environment soothed me enormously, then I was guilty as charged.
Since my writing voice was firmly on strike, I found myself reading voraciously while Jim was away—making my way through a stack of books and magazines I had been intending to read for months. I’d thought that focusing on fiction would help me to escape the lack of momentum in my own writing so novels held high priority, but the tactic was having little effect. I awoke on the fourth morning of my solitude, my knee bumping the books tossed haphazardly onto the opposite side of the bed, and looked out into the dull sky. Where the clouds hung thicker, there were puffy lines of deepest gray—a scowl to interrupt the endless monotony of graphite. I felt restless and edgy so I laced up my running shoes to take advantage of the misty umbrella nature had sent before the sun burned it off and brought on the sizzling heat.
It felt good to let the warm moisture move through my hair as the sweat poured from my body. I felt my breath enter and leave my lungs, marveling that flesh and bone had the fortitude to endure when my emotional self felt so beaten down. As I made my way past the familiar vantage points I always saw on my runs, I wondered how my life would look in twenty years; thought about Picasso’s premise that the artist lies in order to reach another kind of truth. What lies could I tell in order to create a life with a truth I could tolerate? I wondered as I turned the corner toward home, accelerating my speed to match they pace of my disconcerting thoughts.
This is a participating post in a bi-monthly exercise known as Let's Blog Off. I don't know what it is about the choices LBO leaders make for topics, but somehow my ramble through the past 20 years seems to always be on point. The material for this post and the photo of me on Lake Chickamauga were created, oddly enough, 20 years ago almost to the day. I can't wait to see how much headway I make as a writer in the next 20 years! To see posts by the other #LetsBlogOff participants du jour, click here.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
In Defiance of the Cold
The mists on the mountain bluff were my only solace—spinning, lifting and descending during the morning hours. We were in the clouds so much their filmy breathing fanned my morning world more often than the sun christened it with its dawning light. I could see the wispy pirouettes as they danced above the falls—water regaling water. The city, still dressed in drab winter garb even with early spring at hand, took the cloudy tears and used them to wash its streets. There were only tiny bits of color in the dullness of the muted world with the first burgeoning of red buds beginning to glow. The bulbs were still sheathed in soft green but seemed to be thinking seriously about opening their faces to the chilly air—tiny star-shapes in pale shades of their future colors aching to slice through the tips of their bulbous heads to celebrate their tender splendor. Japonica was pushing its Carmine-colored blooms from its bare stems as if in defiance of the cold while everything else preferred to patiently await warmer weather.
I thought about how most people wouldn’t think to describe a dreary world as lush but abundance was everywhere. This realization was unfolding in my mind as I grabbed a scrap of quiet for writing in the midst of the events surrounding Jim’s oldest son’s wedding. I lamented to my writer’s notebook, “I can’t wait to get back to you. I have missed your comfort.” Once life had become my own again, I tentatively approached my writing but it felt far away—a foreign thing after the busy-ness that had left me worn. “I have been away from my heart, so now I touch myself tenderly as I review that piece of me that shows through in the faint strokes of my own anxious pen,” I wrote. “Certain words touch me in return and I am sure they are mine. It is an acknowledgement when they whisper back, and deep emotion sparks in me; brings desire rushing forth and my emptiness is filled. My fullness greets me like a friend, but tentatively as if it is unsure how to approach me in my sadness. How can I fault either of us? I had to erect the walls in order to survive, and she was always forced to wait until I was ready.”
As the weeks progressed, the air warmed and the bony tree limbs sprouted their buds like a fine covering of mesh. I made it a point to enjoy the morning lights of the city knowing that the leaves would soon hide them from my view. As I stared at the awakening landscape, I let my mind skip across scenes from my life like a blind person’s hand touching brail in a delicate search for knowledge. As I did, a thunderhead plumed and I marveled at the power it so magnificently wielded as it drew the perimeters of its iridescent edge with a giant finger of light. It fashioned itself into a gilded pillow of moisture and when it unleashed its contents, the deluge wrapped me in a gray world through which puny light fought its way, entering the room tentatively like a tiptoeing mime bent on remaining silent. The storm thrashed against the windows as if angered that I was out of reach. I stood calmly, daring it to try and touch me.
The days seemed to careen along and suddenly the dogwoods bloomed. They unfolded their creamy flowers in concert with the azaleas, which plumped with profusions of color seemingly overnight. With our last Costa Rica trip about a month away, our destinations for the mission work were about to change. We were meeting with Craig Anderson, the Bishop of South Dakota, about repairing and building churches in his diocese, which held nine of the poorest counties in the United States on Native American reservations. We would be working with the Dakota and Lakota Sioux, and he showed us a video that broke my heart as to the conditions these people were enduring. I wondered what had transpired that would have brought them to the point of the poverty and despair I saw in the documentary.
The film led me to search bookstores in Chattanooga for anything I could find that would help answer this question and the options were slim. I found the book Black Elk Speaks and had a difficult time with the pain the story evoked. I also felt an immediate kinship with the keen connection the Native Americans in the story had felt with nature. I looked at everything around me with a newfound awe—wondering if the owl visiting the bluff at night, being a nocturnal creature, ever felt it missed the visual lushness the daylight hours brought to life. Did he sense the excitement of nature bursting forth all around him? I wondered. Of course he would, lighting as he did on tree branches, which a scant few weeks before had been bare, to find a spiky growth like the prickly surface of a piñata beneath his feet.
It was finally warm enough that I could write on the screened porch in the mornings and I loved being so much closer to the waterfall that its splashing was an accompaniment to my musings. I looked to the horizon and recognized the haze that had spawned the name Smoky Mountains—though we were not officially in the chain, I believed our ridges, which held a similar mix of mists and haze between their expanses, were close enough to share the same characteristics. These gaps and gullies, peaks and valleys were once home to a band of Native Americans with as painful a past as the one I would soon find myself greeting. Would I be up to “representing the church” with these people who painfully tapped into my wounding without even knowing it?
With that question resonating, I scribbled a poem on the empty page open in my lap. It would remain a rare first effort that turned out to be a final draft—even more unique because it predicted my experience in South Dakota and Alaska with eerie accuracy:
Plume
It is difficult
to face
someone else’s struggle
when it stokes the fire
of your own
painful burning,
especially when
you’ve labored for years
to swallow the smoke.
-Saxon Henry
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
