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Interview: Falling Together

Krista Tippett:

I usually start my conversations with an inquiry about the spiritual background of your childhood. And however you would define that. And, as I look at the sweep of your writing, I see so many elements that to me are profoundly spiritual, a long sense of time or a robust commitment to hope. You describe your childhood in so many ways, and in one place — these are words you use, “A scrawny, battered little kid in a violent house.” And I wonder how you would think about that notion of the spiritual background of your childhood. And it occurs to me that perhaps some of these things were seeded by absence, as much as by presence.

Rebecca Solnit:

I think that’s true. And when you asked that question, what comes to mind is kind of a map of where most of my childhood took place. I wrote somewhere that I had an inside-out childhood, because every place was safe but home. If you went just on the other side of the backyard fence was a quarter horse stud farm and then dairy farms and open space. And the landscape and the animals, domestic and wild, were this huge refuge, and really fed encouraged me, and there was a sense of community with the non-human. And so that was if you went north, even just to the other side of the fence and beyond, just endless open space, and oak trees, and grasslands, and wildlife.

And then if you went south, there was a really great public library. And the minute I learned how to read, it was as though I’d been given this huge treasure. Every book was a box I suddenly knew how to open, and in it, I could meet people, go to other worlds, go deep in all kinds of ways. And I spent my childhood in the hills and in the books. So that was not maybe what people think of conventionally as spirituality, but that was my company, my encouragement, my teaching, my community.

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Rebecca Solnit:
I want better metaphors. I want better stories. I want more openness. I want better questions. All these things feel like they give us tools that are a little more commensurate with the amazing possibilities and the terrible realities that we face.

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Rebecca Solnit grew up in much the way I did, walking in the hills of Northern California, reading books.  Northern California is her home and one of the two places I can call home.  Her writing continues to inspire me.

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My friend, Yom, came alone from Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975.  Along with other refugee women, she was given a job doing industrial sewing for Columbia Sportswear at the place where I was working as a sewing machine operator.  We were both in our mid-20s.  We have been friends for nearly 50 years.  For many years, Yom saved her money and bought a home for herself in Seattle and began to create a garden.  Yom married Chris.  Yom and Chris adopted a baby boy from an orphanage in Vietnam nearly 20 years ago.  He just finished his first year of college.  Chris made this video of Yom's beloved garden.  

"Is America Possible?"/ "... Whatever you do, we are going to let our light shine ..." / Young tree finds a home / "... A passion so intense ..."

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While doing my yoga practice this morning I listened to "Is America Possible?", an interview with Vincent Harding by Krista Tippett from 2011 and then read the transcript because there was so much I wanted to remember.  I've been going to the "On Being" archives nearly every day and listening to the interviews under the category of "Across Generations."

Vincent Harding:  "My own feeling that I try to share again and again, Krista, is that when it comes to creating a multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious, democratic society, we are still a developing nation. We’ve only been really thinking about this for about half a century. But my own deep, deep conviction is that the knowledge, like all knowledge, is available to us if we seek it ...

... That was so much part of the way in which the songs try to encourage us not simply to be reactors. So that instead of saying, “You honky governor, you’re no good, and we’re gonna do this or that to you,” the basic, deepest word was, “Whatever you do, we’re gonna let our light shine ..."

....Whenever somebody jokes about “Kum Bah Ya,” my mind goes back to the Mississippi summer experience where the movement folks in Mississippi were inviting co-workers to come from all over the country, especially student types, to come and help in the process of voter registration, and Freedom School teaching, and taking great risks on behalf of the transformation of that state and of this nation. There were two weeks of orientation. The first week was the week in which Schwerner and Goodman and their beloved brother Jimmy were there. And it was during the time that they had left the campus that they were first arrested, then released, and then murdered.

The word came back to us at the orientation that the three of them had not been heard from. Bob Moses, the magnificent leader of so much of the work in Mississippi, got up and told these hundreds of predominantly white young people that, if any of them felt that at this point they needed to return home or to their schools, we would not think less of them at all, but would be grateful to them for how far they had come.

But he said let’s take a couple of hours just for people to spend time talking on the phone with parents or whoever to try to make this decision and make it now. What I found as I moved around among the small groups that began to gather together to help each other was that, in group after group, people were singing “Kum Bah Ya.” “Come by here, my Lord, somebody’s missing, Lord, come by here. We all need you, Lord, come by here.”

I could never laugh at “Kum Bah Ya” moments after that because I saw then that almost no one went home from there. They were going to continue on the path that they had committed themselves to. And a great part of the reason why they were able to do that was because of the strength and the power and the commitment that had been gained through that experience of just singing together “Kum Bah Ya" ..."

Krista Tippett:  I was listening to the BBC in recent weeks, and they’re watching us from afar. They were interviewing a journalist about this moment in American history, which seems very tumultuous and the question was, “Is it really more violent and more despairing than it’s been before or does this happen repeatedly?” And the comparison was made with the 1960s.

They said, look, there was a lot of social turmoil then. There were assassinations, right? I mean, many assassinations. But this journalist said — and I just want to know what you think — he said that he thought the difference between the 1960s and now was that even though there was incredible tumult and violence, it was at the very same time a period of intense hope, and people could see that they were moving towards goals. And that that’s missing now. What do you think about that analysis?

Vincent Harding:  Hmm. Krista, I think that is such a complicated kind of issue that I can only pick at it and tease it out and play with it in the best sense of play. I think that what I see now is the fact that all over this country, wherever I go, and, of course, where I go tends to be sort of self-selective because I am most often going into situations where people are operating out of a sense of hope and possibility, where in their local situations, whether it be Detroit, or Atlanta, or a campus someplace, or a church community in Philadelphia, that there are women and men and young people who are operating out of hope.

My sense is that, in the ‘60s, there was probably a larger kind of canopy of hope that we could see, and we could identify, and that people could name and focus on. Now, we are in particular spots, locations, sometimes seemingly isolated. But I feel that there are points, focal situations, where that is still available and where people are operating from that.

So I think that it is not simply the matter of hope or no hope. I have a feeling that one of the deeper transformations that’s going on now is that for the white community of America, there is this uncertainty growing about its own role, its own control, its own capacity to name the realities that it has moved into a realm of uncertainty that it did not allow itself to face before.

And I think that that’s the place that we are in, and that’s even more the reason why we’ve got to figure out what was King talking about when he was seeing the possibility of a beloved community and recognized that, maybe, for some of us, that cannot come until some of us realize that we must give up what we thought was only ours in the building of a beloved nation. Can there be a beloved nation? Why don’t we try and see?

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In the last few days, I woke up in the middle of the night with the thought that I would buy a Coral Bark Japanese Maple and donate it to Big Rock Garden to take the place of another Japanese maple that had died.  I'd been watching the frail ailing Japanese maple for some time and kept hoping that it would spring back to life.  I talked with one of the many volunteers who give their time to various sections of Big Rock Garden and gave her my phone number.  I was contacted by a retired couple who volunteer their gardening skills and who had also hoped that the maple I was watching would rebound.  I brought a young tree for the couple to see and we walked around Big Rock Garden, looking for possible locations for it.  My hope was that it could be planted in the same area as the one that had died.  Yesterday I went up to Big Rock Garden to see where it had been planted and made a video with my cell phone camera,

Here are the photos the volunteers sent to me:

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(Once again, the fonts resist uniformity.  Why not?)

Revivals

When to my melancholy

All is folly

                 then the whirr
of the hummingbird
at intervals throughout the day

is all that’s sure
to stir me, makes me
jump up, scattering

papers, books, pens—
                                    To the bay window,
and certainly,

there he is below it
true-aimed at the minute cups of
Coral Bells, swerving

perfectly,
the fierce, brilliant faith
that pierces the heart all summer

and sips bitter insects steeped in nectar,
prima materia
of gleam-and-speed-away

A passion so intense

It driveth sorrow hence ...

June afternoon sky / More listening during yoga practice

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John Lewis:

... And you live that you’re already there, that you’re already in that community, part of that sense of one family, one house. If you visualize it, if you can even have faith that it’s there, for you it is already there. And during the early days of the movement, I believed that the only true and real integration for that sense of the beloved community existed within the movement itself ...

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... Because in the final analysis, we did become a circle of trust, a band of brothers and sisters. So it didn’t matter whether we’re Black or white. It didn’t matter whether you came from the North, to the South, or whether you’re a Northerner or Southerner. We were one.

But at the same time, I would tell my members of my own family and members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and members within the movement, within S.N.C.C and S.C.L.C and others, I’ve always said, “Pace yourself, pace yourself.” I would tell my wife and say, “Every fight is not your fight. Pace yourself.” And I would say it to the young people and others sometime, “Don’t get in a hurry. Our struggle is not a struggle that lasts for one day, one week, one month or one year or one lifetime. It is an ongoing struggle.” ...

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... Well, I think about it, but you have to believe there may be setbacks, there may be some disappointments, there may be some interruption. But, again, you have to take the long, hard look. With this belief, it’s going to be OK; it’s going to work out. If it failed to happen during your lifetime, then maybe, not maybe, but it would happen in somebody’s lifetime. But you must do all that you can do while you occupy this space during your time. And sometimes I feel that I’m not doing enough to try to inspire another generation of people to find a way to get in the way, to make trouble, good trouble. I just make a little noise ...

Looking at the mid-June sky / Listening while doing yoga practice / "What If We Get This Right?"

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This poem by a young woman was read during the interview with Ayana Elizabeth Johnson titled "What If We Get This Right?"

 "On Another Panel About Climate, They Ask Me to Sell the Future and All I’ve Got Is a Love Poem."

“What if the future is soft and revolution is so kind that there is no end to us in sight.

“Whole cities breathe and bad luck is bested by a promise to the leaves.

“To withstand your own end is difficult.

“The future frolics about, promised to no one, as is her right.

“Rage against injustice makes the voice grow harsher yet.

“If the future leaves without us, the silence that will follow will be an unspeakable nothing.

“What if we convince her to stay?

“How rare and beautiful it is that we exist.

“What if we stun existence one more time?

“When I wake up, get out of bed, my seven year old cousin

“with her ruptured belly tags along.

“Then follows my grandmother, aunts, my other cousins
and the violent shape of their drinking water.

“The earth remembers everything,
our bodies are the color of the earth and we
are nobodies.

“Been born from so many apocalypses, what’s one more?

“Love is still the only revenge. It grows each time the earth is set on fire.

“But for what it’s worth, I’d do this again.
Gamble on humanity one hundred times over

“Commit to life unto life, as the trees fall and take us with them.

“I’d follow love into extinction.”

-- Ayisha Saddiqa

(Note:  I was unable to get the font sizes to match each other in this poem which was copied from the transcript of the interview with Ayana Elizabeth Johnson)

Revisiting Robin Wall Kimmerer / A plant story from my life / Falling in love with the world again / A song that gave me something I needed during last few dark cloud years / Fluffy white clouds

Here.

Last night I woke up at around midnight after about 5-1/2 hours of sleep.  Unable to go back to sleep, I read for awhile, listened to a guided meditation, and then I got up and checked my email and found a link to the interview by Krista Tippett with Robin Wall Kimmerer, which I just finished listening to.  I've been using this On Being archive recently as a source of inspiration while I draw or when I can't sleep at night.

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In the interview, Robin Wall Kimmerer says that although she had no indigenous elders as teachers when she was a child, she did have the natural world, specifically plants, as elders, as teachers. 

"... I was lucky enough to grow up in the fields and the woods of upstate New York. I was lucky in that regard, but disappointed, also, in that I grew up away from the Potawatomi people, away from all of our people, by virtue of history — the history of removal and the taking of children to the Indian boarding schools. And so in a sense, the questions that I had about who I was in the world, what the world was like, those are questions that I really wished I’d had a cultural elder to ask; but I didn’t.

But I had the woods to ask. And there’s a way in which just growing up in the woods and the fields, they really became my doorway into culture. In the absence of human elders, I had plant elders, instead ..."

I can say the same.  I grew up without elders as teachers (there were few elders present in my childhood, much less wise elder teachers) but from an early age I took long walks by myself.  The first plant teachers I remember were tumbleweeds and weeping willow trees and English ivy and fig trees and an apricot tree during the time my family lived in the desert that is the San Joaquin Valley of California.  Then on the San Francisco Peninsula, I remember California poppies, redwood trees, eucalyptus trees, bay laurel trees, oak trees, and various fruit trees.   The poisonous oleanders in the San Joaquin Valley as well as the poison oak on the San Francisco Peninsula were teachers, too. 

The first plant food I remember eating was sugar.  My first word was "cookie."  At age 10, when I went on my first diet, the plant foods I remember eating were sugar, potatoes, peas, corn, carrots, celery, iceberg lettuce, artichokes, the various vegetables that were in Campbell's soup, fresh fruit, and highly processed grains in the form of Rice-A-Roni, canned spaghetti, Wonder Bread, sourdough bread, and English muffins.  On Thanksgiving and Christmas, we ate wild rice.  I didn't like the taste of fresh tomatoes and refused to eat them, although I liked tomato sauces.  I didn't like mushrooms or olives or licorice.  I was what was known as a picky eater, although what I did like to eat I ate in large amounts, especially cookies, donuts, brownies, cake, pie, chocolate candy, and ice cream.

Alcohol is a plant food.  The first time I remember tasting alcohol was when I was forced to eat a  an entire Bourbon ball around Christmas time at the home of some friends of my parents.  It was offered to me and so I took a bite, thinking it would taste like chocolate.  It tasted awful to me.  I made a face.  My mother insisted that I "be polite" and eat the whole thing.  The next thing I remember is vomiting in the bathroom of their friends' home.  

The second time I remember having alcohol in my mouth was when I was confirmed in the Episcopal church at age 10.  I had felt nauseous while sitting in the pews before taking the sip of communion wine and after that sip I felt so ill that I walked out of the church in a hurry, not wanting to vomit or faint in church.

In the Episcopal church we attended, the wine ritual didn't happen every week.  After that peculiar confirmation experience, I was able to have a sip of wine at church without apparent consequences, unless I count that fact that once I had the tiniest bit of alcohol in my system, I experienced an acute sense of craving which could not be satiated, although I tried to satisfy the craving with the fancy array of cookies that was laid out on long table in the parish hall during what they called the coffee hour.  I would go back to the cookie table again and again, never ever feeling satisfied or full when it came to sugar.   

Both of my parents seemed to drink sensibly and both of them seemed to have the same reaction I did, which was that they craved sugar and struggled with their weight.  They began dieting at the same time I did but never lost the weight they wanted to lose. 

Until I was 37 years old, I struggled with my weight and lived with depression.  I drank alcohol socially and didn't feel that it caused me any problems.  It was only when I made a decision to stop eating sugar (except for that which occurs naturally in food) and to stop drinking alcohol (when I fell in love briefly with a recovering alcoholic) that I found peace of mind and body.  Since I stopped drinking alcohol, I have not experienced the degree of depression or the craving for food that I seemed to be an unchangeable part of who I was.

It occurred to me while I was listening to Robin Wall Kimmerer that those two plant-based foods were my teachers and that once I learned the lesson they had for me, I didn't need them anymore.  They are like oleanders and poison oak for me.  I need good boundaries with them.

I know of only a few people who have had an experience like mine with both of these plant teachers and that for most people, alcohol and sugar are two of life's simple joys, a sweet part of many celebrations.  I wish I could enjoy alcohol and sugar without experiencing that phenomenon of craving but that is not my fate.  

At various times it was suggested to me by medical professionals that I needed to be on medication for the rest of my life.  Not so.  I am fortunate to have found the key to the relief of my depression and struggles with weight that were insurmountable because I could not stop eating once I triggered that craving with even the smallest amount of alcohol. There are many who have stories about issues with food and weight and depression.  This is my story.

Alcohol and sugar aren't my enemies.  They are two beautiful plant teachers, two wise plant elders.  They had much to teach about what for me are healthy boundaries.

Why am I telling this story now?  On May 8, it was 35 years since the last time I drank alcohol.  I clearly remember the suicidal depression that followed that last drink and the dark cloud over my life that lifted in the months that followed and has not returned.  On September 26 of that year, I stopped eating white sugar and ate none at all for more than 10 years, although I continued to eat honey and other unrefined sugars until I could no longer tolerate them either.  My body has told me again and again that it does not appreciate sugar.  

As recently as 2019, I experimented with eating anything and everything I wanted to eat but quickly gained 20 pounds and found myself always thinking about food and craving it in the way that only happens when I eat sugar.  I wasn't binging.  I was just eating much more food at meals than I had eaten in years.  Even so, the craving for more food was nothing like that which I experienced when drinking minimal amounts of alcohol.  I did not feel suicidal when eating sugar but my mind began to be cluttered with thoughts of when my next meal would be.

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Krista Tippett:  Here’s something you wrote. You talked about goldenrods and asters a minute ago, and you said, “When I am in their presence, their beauty asks me for reciprocity, to be the complementary color, to make something beautiful in response.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer:   Yes. And I think of my writing very tangibly, as my way of entering into reciprocity with the living world. It’s that which I can give. And it comes from my years as a scientist, of deep paying attention to the living world, and not only to their names, but to their songs. And having heard those songs, I feel a deep responsibility to share them and to see if, in some way, stories could help people fall in love with the world again.

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Volunteer plant teachers on my porch:

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Just finished reading Last Chance Texaco, by Rickie Lee Jones, which prompted me to find her songs on YouTube.  "We Belong Together" still moves as it did when I first heard it.  Rickie Lee's childhood and youth were wilder than mine, but there was much she wrote about that matched my experiences as a girl and young woman.  

In this past week, a younger woman told me that my speaking voice sounded like the woman whose voice is heard at the beginning of "Fluffy Clouds," by the Orbs.  I listened on YouTube and wondered if my voice really sounded like that.  Curious, I began googling to find out who the woman was.  It was Rickie Lee Jones.  At the end, she talks about pretending she was a horse when she was young.  I remember doing that.   I can see that my voice has that kind of stop and start quality, a similar cadence.  She sounds a little congested.  I do, too.  She smiles through her words.  I used to hate the sound of my voice and everything about myself.  That was part of the dark cloud that lifted.  I love that my voice sounds like Rickie Lee Jones.  I'm grateful to that younger woman who set me on a path that led to Rickie Lee Jones' book and back to her music.

"I got saved by the beauty of the world" (Mary Oliver) with Update (-:

The Tower of Blue Horses, by Franz Marc

From Franz Marc's Blue Horses, by Mary Oliver

I step into the painting of the four blue horses. 

I am not even surprised that I can do this.

This is what I listened to today.

This is what I hear at night with my windows open:

Just for fun.  Bob Dylan singing "Froggie Went a Courtin":

At Scudder Pond, the frogs wake up first and then the birds.  Listen for the ducks.