Facebookistan? / Icy Foggy Morning / Red Cedar in Flight, Refusing to Die / Update on Facebook issues

"There are a lot of people who don't trust Facebook but use it anyway because everybody else is on Facebook, but I think they recognize that there could be a tipping point where suddenly, you know, everybody just leaves." (At 56:21 -- Rebecca MacKinnon, a Facebook user, author of Consent of the Networked, internet activist, and co-founder of Global Voices)

My Facebook page is only deactivated, not deleted, and this video gave me much to think about in our connected world today.  So much depends on being on Facebook, often including being able to get a job. I have not yet left Facebook completely, but if there ever were to be a fee to use Facebook, I would leave.  There are other options for being in touch with those I want to be in touch with.  I am grateful for the option of blogging.  May it always be free and allow us to be as anonymous as we wish to be.

Then, of course, there is the issue of loss of net neutrality and the real possibility of less freedom on the internet and beyond.  There is also the possibility of more freedom in the realm that has nothing to do with the internet.  I'm going to focus on that possibility.

We grieved when this extraordinary Red Cedar tree, which had survived against all odds, was cut down this past summer because someone from the local parks department with power and a chainsaw determined that it was "dead."  A few days later, we noticed the two young trees that had been growing from its side for some time.  Our Red Cedar tree is not dead.

Here, in Red Cedar language, is the story of the tree that is not dead. May the two young trees that are growing from it like new wings carry on the Red Cedar tradition of storytelling far into the future.

Update.  Mark Zuckerberg accepting responsibility for problems with Facebook:

"We won't prevent all mistakes or abuse, but we currently make too many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools. If we're successful this year, then we'll end 2018 on a much better trajectory."

May it be so.

Together Through Life Totem Meditation / September 9, 2016

(Click to embiggen)

This morning I woke up at about 3 a.m. sensing something extremely painful throughout my body -- a sensation I couldn't identify.  It wasn't a new feeling.  In fact, it felt very very old -- something I have never wanted to fully feel -- something that would overwhelm a child and, if the child survived, those painful sensations would be triggered again and again throughout life whenever anything happened that even remotely resembled abandonment.

A DVD copy of "My Own Love Song," featuring a soundtrack by Bob Dylan, arrived in the mail yesterday. When it became clear that I wasn't going to be able to get back to sleep, I got up and watched it.  A major theme in the film is abandonment and healing from abandonment. Take what you have gathered from coincidence.

Just now I wondered about the etymology of the word "abandon."   

To put someone under someone else's control.

"- ment." Added to verb stems to represent the result or product of the action.

Abandonment.  Who abandoned whom?

Bob Dylan's collection of songs "Together Through Life" was released almost exactly a year after the death of the man I loved for so many years.  Perhaps it was back then that I heard that the songs were written by Bob Dylan for a movie but as far as I can tell, the movie was never released anywhere near where I live.  I do remember hearing "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'" and taking it joyfully to my heart because it reminded me of the man I loved who had died.  Then I saw the horrifying video of domestic violence that was paired with it, which broke my denial about the domestic violence I experienced when the man I loved who came back broken from the war in Vietnam abandoned me, or so I thought at the time.  His brother-in-law was trying to show me otherwise when he said, "He would have destroyed you."  I'm wondering if that abandonment was a fierce desperate kindness, impossible to begin to understand or accept until last night. Right now I'm recalling the film, "Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood," where the mother says:

"There are some things for which I don't expect to be forgiven, not by my children or even by God."

I can't find the other quote I am looking for, but my recollection is that the mother says that after she attacked her children during a drunken amphetamine-induced rage, she could never trust herself to be close to them again and pushed them away to protect them from her.  

The man I love hit me in an amphetamine-induced rage.  The "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'" violence is in the context of amphetamines.  My mother took a prescription amphetamine from 1954 until the day she died.  As I was being beaten up by the man I loved, it felt just like being beaten up by my mother when I was a child.  The difference was that I found the voice that I didn't have as a child, and I yelled as loud as I could, "YOU CAN'T HIT ME." I was not only yelling at him.  I was yelling at my mother.

He immediately stopped.  I don't know for sure, but I think that was one of the many things he did that he felt was unforgivable.  His own parents had beat him.  His sister told me that his father beat him and his brothers until they vomited.  He promised never to hit me again. Many years later he said, "You stood up to me."

We separated soon after that.  

I wonder why this is all coming up again now.  Now I'm remembering the time I was in my bedroom, home on a break from my first quarter of college, when I heard my mother chasing my youngest sister (who was 12 years old at the time) into the bathroom and begin to beat her as she had beaten both us throughout our childhood.  I clearly remember crouching in the hallway next to my bedroom the last time my mother hit me.  I am fairly sure that I was under 11 years old but not much younger.  I remember thinking, "That doesn't hurt.  She can't make me cry." I wonder if she sensed that she had lost her power over me when I didn't cry.  This time, I knew what I needed to do for my sister. I ran to the bathroom and looked at my mother and said in a quiet angry voice, "DON'T YOU EVER HIT MY SISTER AGAIN."  She stopped.  Nothing more was said.  I went back to my bedroom.

There had been no one to protect me.  I am the oldest of three daughters.  My middle sister says that our mother only hit her once and that, in my sister's words, "I deserved it." 

Where am I going with this?  I'm not sure.  I've come a long way since I woke up at 3 a.m.  Have I written anything new?  Each time I tell these stories, I learn a little more about myself and those involved.

I'll be 67 years old in a few weeks.  It is never to late to heal.  It is never to late to truly feel how painful it is feel abandoned and find that I can survive the pain that I couldn't feel until now.  To have reached the point where I don't abandon myself.  That I don't put myself under someone else's control.  That I am now freed to see that what I perceived as abandonment by someone else could be accepted years later as a paradoxical gift.  

Just before the sun rose, I heard a Virginia rail.

It's a beautiful September day.

A friend was giving out dahlia bulbs last spring.  Today my dahlia plant is blooming for the first time.  It looks to me as if it has wings.  A dahlia angel.

Dahlias are "the symbol of a commitment and bond that lasts forever.  The dahlia flower is still used today in gardens and flower arrangements to celebrate love and marriage."

Today I received a message from a distant cousin who lives in Zagreb, Croatia.  We are among the many people who have had our DNA tested and are discovering each other and are trying to figure out who our common ancestors are.  I also heard from a man in Italy who had an Irish mother and from a man from Germany who knows of ancestors from Dresden and from what is Poland today.

My eyes are just like my grandfather whose mother came from Achern, Germany, and whose father came from Stadtlengsfeld, Germany, in the 1800s.  A friend who was born in Dublin said that I looked more Irish than she did.  Although my father's side is almost entirely Norwegian, there is a great great grandfather on that side who didn't marry my great great grandmother and was said to have been German.  Perhaps his ancestors came north to Germany from Croatia or Italy.

My 23andMe results show:

Scandinavian   25.9%
British & Irish 25.1%
French & German 8.9%
Broadly Northwestern European 33.9%
Eastern European 2.8%
Broadly European 3.2%
East Asian   0.2%
Yakut           0.1%

My Ancestry.com results show:

North Africa 1%
Scandinavia  44%
Great Britain 28%
Ireland 13%
Iberian Peninsula 5%
Europe West 4%
Europe East 2%
Italy/Greece 1%
West Asia -- Caucasus 2%

Joni Mitchell / Healing / Resurrection

(Self-portrait by Joni Mitchell on CD cover for Turbulent Indigo from 1994)



From Joni Mitchell's liner notes for Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting To Be Danced, released November 17, 2014:

"This box set is rising like a phoenix from the ashes of two dead projects -- a ballet and a horrendously ill-conceived box set. They started it without me. They hired two incompetents to "do" me. It was to be a 2-disc set -- peppered with discarded and damaged work -- for the sake of something "new." They hired a burglar to enter my storage space (ironically called "A Safe Place"). He rummaged around and came back with the dregs. "Why are you doing this?" I asked the bosses. "That's the way it's done," was the reply. "Not to me," I said and I squelched it. A little while later, the bosses were fired, and just before the company went belly up, I got the bills -- for their mistake.

The ballet is a dream I hope to somehow resurrect. We'll see. Meanwhile, with these notes coming to an end, my work is done. I'm celebrating. I'm pouring myself a glass of wine. I'd like to drink a toast. If God is dead and love is dead, is talent the next fatality? Let's drink a toast to talent. Here's to you, talent -- may you be resurrected, too."

From "Love Puts On A New Face" (1998):

"Everyday
Love puts on a new face
Love puts on a new face
Love has many faces
Many, many faces."

And "My Best To You" (1998), the closing song for Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting To Be Danced:

"So here's to you
May your dreams come true
May old father time
Never be unkind
And through the years
Save your smiles and your tears
They're just souvenirs
They'll make music in your heart

Remember this
Each new day is a kiss
Sent from up above
With an angel's love
So here's to you
May your skies be blue
And your love blessed
That's my best to you

Remember this
Each new day is a kiss
Sent from up above
With an angel's love
So here's to you
May your skies be blue
And your love blessed
That's my best to you"

Listening / Awake and Alive

Perry McClellan and Judith Gorman read the words of their son Orrin Gorman McClellan who penned these poems while serving with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan in 2005-2006.  Orrin, who struggled with PTSD after returning home, took his own life in 2010.
(Paragraph quoted from here)

Most people have the option of forgetting.  It's a survival thing.  Artists do not have that option, and I think that may of us suffer from hypermnesia, an exceptionally exact and vivid memory and often associated with mental illness, but our whole act of creating ... depends on that memory.  The only way we can get rid of it is to put it down on paper.

(Allen Say)

Train wheels runnin' through the back of my memory.

(Bob Dylan)

I am always doing what I cannot do in order than I may learn from it.

(Picasso)

May my silences become more accurate.

(Theodore Roethke)

The Things We Carried

Ever since I heard that there was going to be a showing of a movie of a fairly recent book talk by Tim O'Brien on The Things They Carried (first published in 1990), I considered whether I should go see the 1-hour movie with a discussion afterward.  The movie was part of a series called "Writers in the Limelight," presented by Village Books (Bellingham's independent book store) at the tiny Limelight Cinema in downtown Bellingham.

Since 2006 when I began this blog, I've come a long way with the things I've carried in the wake of the Vietnam War, and I questioned the wisdom of visiting those memories today.  After a walk with a friend down by Bellingham Bay this morning and meeting with a group of friends afterward, I decided to risk opening old wounds in the hope of finding some healing for those old wounds.

Outside the theater, I recognized a Vietnam veteran who speaks in the local schools as a member of Veterans for Peace.  There were two other men of similar age along with a few women who looked to be in their 60s.  The event was sparsely attended.  There may have been a few younger people, but most of the men and woman appeared to be in their 60s or older.  After the movie, there was a short discussion facilitated by one of the booksellers from Village Books.

It was a wise decision for me to be there today.  I can look back, look at the present, and also look forward without the haunted feeling that I lived with for so long.

What I've posted below is a similar recent book talk on The Things They Carried.  It's worth listening to.  After an introduction, Tim O'Brien begins speaking at about 3:40: