And Where are YOU From?

O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the fourth Friday this past June, two events happened simultaneously – one of those mysterious moments of synchronicity.

President Obama issued an Executive Order giving young adults brought to this country as children a chance to temporarily remain here. Technically these young adults are classified as undocumented immigrants and are subject to deportation because they do not fulfill the prerequisites for permanent visas. The stipulations of the Executive Order are: no criminal record, a high school diploma or in school, service in the armed forces, and under age 30. Young adults who qualify now can obtain temporary work permits. Obama’s action surprised most of Washington, a city not noted for keeping secrets.

On the same day, Time magazine’s cover story, titled “We Are Americans,” was published. It was a story that had been researched for a year. It detailed stories of the nation’s undocumented immigrants who had come here as children. Jose Antonio Vargas, author of the article, is a 31 year old who has worked as a journalist for over a decade, including a staff position with the Washington Post. He was sent to this country from the Philippines when he was twelve to live with his grandparents. He is the only one of his large extended family who does not have papers.

Tired of hiding his personal history, skirting the edges, and worrying daily about being deported, he chose to come out in a very public way in an essay in Atlantic a year ago. Since then, he has traveled across much of the country speaking publicly and collecting stories from other young adults who live as shadow Americans. The article in Time is powerful – and well worth reading.

All of this discussion of the complex issues of immigration has caused me to reflect on my own history as the granddaughter of immigrants. And on several life-transforming experiences that changed the course of my life.

I grew up in an isolated Midwestern rural community among Catholic and Protestant Scandinavian or German descendents. There were no Asians living in my town. No African-Americans – or Africans. No Jewish people. And no atheists, at least no one who declared themselves as such. When I graduated from college, a place with similar demographics, I moved half-way across the country to Washington DC to work at the National Institutes of Health. My cultural immersion in this international city began there.

Then I moved back to the Midwest with the intention of being the best traditional wife I could be. But I did the math and realized I would be in my mid-forties when my second child left home. What was I then to do with the other half of my adult life? I applied and was accepted into graduate school in one of the biochemistry departments at the University of Minnesota - pretty oblivious to the emerging women’s movement that was challenging traditional women’s roles.

But I had changed during the five years I was at home as that stay-at-home Mom with two small children. I discovered I was more interested in my fellow graduate students’ different cultural backgrounds than in the research I was doing in the lab. My particular lab had persons from South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. I sorted out my fascination with their lives and realized what it said about me. I transferred into the psychology department, where I completed my doctorate – and spend the next 35 years as a therapist in private practice. No more lipid research for me!

The third set transformational experiences in my life were twenty-five years of international travel. Growing up, I never expected to travel anywhere. Moving to Washington DC meant exploration  up and down the East coast. Later, with our children and camping gear, we ranged across much of the United States and Canada. But going beyond those trips to visit foreign places still seemed unimaginable.

My first trip “across the pond” to England and Scotland opened a wide doorway in my life. I ranged further – and for the first time saw my country through the eyes of non-Americans. Why we Americans are envied and admired – and hated. I explored places I once thought of as exotic, conversed with people, ate their food, and visited in their homes. When I returned home after every journey, I returned as a different person.

My own immigrant ancestors? My grandfather, Pedar, immigrated in his mid-twenties from Denmark and settled in northern Minnesota in the midst of other Danish immigrants. There he met my grandmother, Bodil Christine, who had come from Denmark at about the same time as he did – the teen-age daughter of Danish farmers. And I have no idea about their status in this country – as permanent residents or citizens.

I know little about the background of my maternal family – other than having a Scots-Irish great-grandmother who came to the United States as a teenager. Her lineage meant that her ancestors had been induced or coerced to move from Protestant Scotland to the northern part of Ireland, to wrest it away from Catholicism. A part of the historical roots of the Troubles, twentieth century Ireland’s bloody warring.

My husband’s family were all German – with qualifications. His maternal ancestors left Germany to escape religious persecution and settled in White Russia for several generations. We have wondered if that makes my husband half-Russian – a fact we would prefer the issuers of visas to some foreign countries never discover, especially since he has traveled twice to Russia.

All of this history has left me wondering where have I come from. Aren’t we all immigrants? If you believe our ancestors were Adam and Eve, human history started in a particular place from which the entire world eventually was populated. Or if you believe we evolved from humanoids, ape-like creatures, who learned to walk upright somewhere in Africa, the conclusion is the same.

Aren’t we all immigrants? And what would this world be if such immigration never occurred and we remained huddled in a small area in Africa? And the rest of the Earth remained people –free.

Now  ~  Where are YOU from? 

The Changing Face of Creating Change

some people

ascend out of our life, other people

enter our life and sit down . . .

some people climb up on the roof,

sit down at table . . .
  

from a poem by the Norwegian poet,

Rolf  Jacobsen,
who increasingly became
skeptical

of technology after WWII 

There is no question that we live in chaotic world! Sometimes I want to block my ears and eyes. Go outside and garden, trying to believe my small piece of paradise is all that exists. Sounds of bird songs, trickling water, and wind through the trees soothe my soul and help prevent “news-overload.”Then inevitably, I am drawn back into the world’s turmoil.

I grew up in a Midwestern rural and insulated community. There was no daily newspaper. The weekly local paper was just that – local - with news about people in our town and surrounding farms. Television was for watching The Lawrence Welk Show and Liberace. News briefs before the Saturday movie matinee were all I heard about the world beyond – and these news reports seemed unreal. After all, this was the 1950’s. No one wanted to hear what was happening in any of those foreign countries!

Then I married. My new husband and I left the next day for Washington DC. It was like moving to another planet! Rural to urban. Isolation to an international city. And finding the way from one place to another. In my home town, streets were laid out in a straight east-west north-south grid, making it easy to find your way. Washington was a bewildering maze of streets going every which way. Circles at intersections channeled traffic in multiple directions.

I can’t begin to tell you how many times we got lost! Ice cream in the trunk from the grocery and heading off across the Potomac and into the hinterlands of Virginia. Coming to the circle by American University where my husband was to do graduate work – and ending up miles away in Great Falls, Maryland.

It was the tumultuous 1960’s. Many encounters and experiences shaped me and expanded my perspective. When JFK was assassinated I wandered the streets with other stunned people. I stood in disbelief that this tragedy could be happening -  as I watched our president’s body being transported to Bethesda Naval Hospital.

Social change was in the air I breathed. Not surprisingly, a spirit of social activism was born within my heart and soul. Lyndon Johnson introduced his War on Poverty in his State of the Union address in 1964, expanding the government’s role in education and health care. Head Start was created to help low-income kids catch up and increase their chances of being educationally successful and I was one of its enthusiastic supporters. Johnson’s Great Society intended to solve urban problems by ending poverty and racial injustice. We truly believed we could change the face of our country – and the world beyond.

Civil rights protests were common. By prearrangement, people would gather together to force an end to white people’s oppression of non-whites. Some marches were massive and peaceful, such as the March on Washington at the end of August 1963, when the Washington Mall overflowed with people.

Elsewhere, protests sometimes were violent. Dogs were unleashed against protesters. Police and state troopers used tear gas and fire hoses to break up crowds of people. Intimidation, economic retaliation, beatings, and arrests were other common “tools” used to maintain the status quo.

A year ago I was in Selma Alabama. I was moved to tears when I stood by the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was the 1965 site of  Bloody Sunday. Six hundred civil rights workers approached  the bridge, with the intent to march eastward to the capital. They were met by local sheriff deputies and state troopers and attacked with tear gas and billy clubs.

Later I paused in  Birmingham at another civil rights monument. There, a statue of Rosa Parks stands at the bus stop where she dared to not follow the rules. She refused to give up her seat for a white passenger. I somtimes have asked myself if I would have had such courage.

Later, the war in Vietnam was challenged by protesters – a war that polarized the country. One vivid memory is etched in my mind - the day police in riot gear and face masks trotted down the Mall at the University of Minnesota where I was a graduate student. Tear gas filled buildings – and my world view was altered again. The cost of people-power challenging entrenched political and military power.

Today, we are at a radically new time in the history of social protest. Arab Spring began a year and a half ago in Tunisia when a desperate street vendor, Mohamed Bouzizi, set himself on fire. Although turmoil had been fermenting in a number of Arab countries for some time, this man’s action set off an unprecedented rebellion. One oppressive regime after another has been toppled. Today, we watch in horror as Syria’s massacres cost life after life. World governments strive for solutions, amidst what they have learned from the overthrow of dictators in Libya, Egypt, and other Arab countries. It is a steep learning curve with little precedent.

No question - these events in the Middle East could not have happened without today’s technology of Internet connections, cell phones, and Twitter. Protesters in the streets have had equally steep learning curves - as they become more and more proficient in using such tools.

Oppression thrives on fear and the isolation of individuals from each other. “Divide and conquer” is a centuries-old way for a few people to retain control of masses of people. A desperately poor man like Mohamed Bouzizi lived in such isolation. When his license to sell his goods was denied, he saw no recourse in his despair. But it was cell phone photos of his act that sparked street protests that turned Tunisia upside down.

Today we suffer not so much from a loss of innocence, but from a loss of ignorance. In the past, we did not have a “window on the world,” courtesy of the evening news and continual on-line updates that chronicle events around the world. So different from the time of my growing up. A time when there was no need to cover one’s ears and eyes. People believed that WWII was the last war and no one was talking about poverty or discrimination.

The tools of social change have been modified dramatically from my memories of social activism when I was young and filled with the certainty that we could make a difference. Now technology in its various forms makes instant connection possible.

One example is Change.org. Ben Rattray launched the website from his house five years ago. This site provides ways for people to locate other people who share a passion for the same issue. The goal of  Change.org " is to change the balance of power between individuals and large organizations" seeking control. The same goal my young heart yearned to make happen so many years ago.

I am reminded of the following words I wrote some weeks ago, using Rolf Jacobsen's poetic form:

some people fall off edges

           while other people push the edges

some people dance in circles

while other people ask questions

some people are easily forgotten

while other people are unforgettable

some people are all it takes

to change the world

Acting on a Whim

Fools believe they know everything.

The wise understand they know very little

and are ever curious about the unknown.

 I was angry. Damn angry! I’d been rummaging around in my childhood memories about church. As sometimes happens, I connected with painful experiences I thought I had long discarded.

It was early on a beautiful blue-sky Sunday morning. I sat on our deck, looking out at the garden’s June abundance and considered my options. Going to church definitely was not one of them. A clergy woman, whom I knew, once said that “church is stand up, sing loud, sit down, shut up, listen.” The last thing that I needed was words, words, and more words. Listening to some sermon where responding was not permitted.

I could spend the morning weeding. There always are a few invaders that have their own ideas of what my garden should be. But then I risked more painful memories surfacing and floating around in my head — and further feeding my anger . Something I had learned was not particularly useful or productive.

Perhaps I could take my favorite spade and go back into the corner of the yard where we compost leaves to enrich the soil. There I could dig a deep hole and dump all these memories in the hole, along with my anger. Cover the hole and stomp on it. There, damn the whole lot! But as I considered the pleasure of stomping on the past, I knew it would not stay where I put it.

Maybe I should leave town for the day. Go to some place where I could hike to clear my soul. But I did not want to risk contaminating any of my favorite places with leakage of damaging memories from the past.

On a whim, I decided to go to an alien version of church. Sneak in the side door of the Catholic parish near my home. Whatever Catholics did on a Sunday morning, I knew they didn’t worship like Protestants.

Off I went. As an invader, I figured I needed to camouflage myself. Like clever weeds in my garden that often choose to grow near desired plants that look similar to them — to avoid being seen long enough to gather up strength to strangle my carefully cultivated perennials. Even though I wasn’t thinking of strangling Catholics or anyone else. Just my past.

I slipped in as people were gathering and found a place. The walls were stark white. The warm wood of the pews softened the open space. Other than a few candles near the altar, it was unadorned and covered with a simple white cloth. The cross too was bare, and draped with a long piece of white material. There were no stained glass windows in this light filled place. This space that did not fit my preconceptions of what “Catholic” looked like.

Paradoxically, it was a place of silence, even with the sounds of people finding their places. Then the music began. It was not the familiar hymns I had sung all my life. This music was different, personal, intimate.

I watched very carefully. I stood when other people did and sat down when they did. I listened to words they used in responses unfamiliar to me — and pretended I knew these words. Words everyone else had said all their lives.

Lay people, not the priest, began by reading scripture, lots of scripture. When I thought Catholics never read the Bible. Lots of music was woven around words everyone sang. And the choir didn’t perform an anthem, like I was used to. Then the priest preached a sermon, puny in length compared to what Protestants consider to be a good sermon. So this is it. Short service and I was ready to leave.

Wait a minute. What in the world were they doing? Folks settled down in the pews as though all of this was merely the prelude. The liturgy became even more foreign to me. Lots of words and responses, but I had quit listening. Something else was happening here and in my soul. I was fascinated — and never noticed  my anger had slipped away.

After the bread and wine were blessed, everyone flowed forward to various places, where lay people offered the bread and wine from a communal cup. And they looked you in the eye. It all was very personal. In my Protestant church, only clergy served communion and laypeople never touched the communion-ware. And when I took communion there, I kept my head bowed and did not look at anyone.

I joined the holy parade. My mistake! No, not because I was treated as an invader. I was included in some mystery my head did not understand. My mistake — because I went back the next Sunday. And the next. Acting on a whim to distract myself from hurtful memories, on a fine June morning, far-reaching changes in my life were set in motion. Something way beyond any differences in rituals people use in their worship together. 

Little did I know that my lifetime understanding of words was about to be transformed. It was a first step that moved me to the time ten years later, when I ended my work as a psychotherapist to explore creative gifts that had laid dormant within me.

With this simple act of venturing into an unknow tradition, my world was turned upside down. I wonder if I’d known what would happen within me, if I would have run in the opposite direction. As fast as possible!

But then I never would have claimed being a writer or become a poet. Nor would I have embraced gifts hidden within me to become a fine arts photographer.

Not the World We Used to Know

I invented this rule for myself to be applied

to every decision I might have to make in the future.

I would sort out all the arguments

and see what belonged to fear and which to creativeness;

and other things being equal, I would make the decision which

had the larger number of creative reasons on its side.

I think it must be a rule something like this

that makes jonquils and crocuses come pushing through cold mud.

                             Katherine Butler Hathaway, English writer

                                                                              1890-1942

The song, “The Times They Are A-Changin’” written by Bob Dylan, became one of the anthems for the civil rights movement in 1960’s. Although its words are a half century old, they are as fresh today as if they just were written. Their admonition to “start swimming or you will sink like a stone” speaks to the chaotic world of this twenty-first century. Our changing world is not going to return to the way it was. Instead, we need to “start swimming” if we are to survive the upheaval that is everywhere.

Crystal-ball predictions for the future are not particularly accurate during stable times. It’s anyone’s guess what our global community will look like a year from now or five years from now. There are so many variables that Siri, the iPhone 4S’s personal assistant, can not make an intelligible response about the future — even though it is great fun to ask “her” such questions as what is the meaning of life?. IBM’s supercomputer Watson, who starred on the game show Jeopardy, is not likely to do much better! Even intelligent software cannot accurately predict the unimaginable.

However, such instability and uncertainty are not an invitation to excuse ourselves from action. One of the extraordinary qualities about our being human is the way that we raise to the occasion in times of crisis. All of us have our stories of people who have accomplished the impossible.

I remember being on a mission project in Tennessee’s Cumberland Mountains. We (adults and teenagers) were assigned to small groups of five or six. Every morning, we fanned out across small valleys, where generations ago people found a toehold to raise their families. Our assignments were to work on whatever projects local people had requested help. Tasks involved painting — inside or outside. And building outhouses, mowing, or clearing away kudzu vines running rampant over everything in their path.

As the small groups returned one evening, word spread like wildfire about what had happened at one work-site. A front porch had collapsed on one of our volunteers, pinning him to the ground. The young minister’s back had been broken and he was hospitalized in critical condition.

We learned that other members of his group did not stand around deliberating about what they should do. As if they were a single entity, they first lifted the porch off the young man. They figured out where to find a phone and how to bring the nearest medical rescue team to their very rural site. When an ambulance arrived from many miles away, the injured man was rushed to a hospital and then airlifted to a larger facility in Nashville. And the small group of people, who lifted that porch from his damaged body, reflected on how they had accomplished the impossible.

We gathered that night on a hilltop under the stars. We prayed for his healing and for his family. Phone calls had been made to home churches. Word rapidly traveled from Minnesota to across a wide swath of southeastern United States. It was my first experience with the power of prayer by thousands of people focused on one family’s ordeal.

After weeks in an ICU unit, the young man was transferred to a rehabilitation facility for intensive physical therapy. A year later, he returned to ministry. A wheelchair gave him mobility to reach out to others and return the care he received from so many people.

Feats of “inhuman strength” and stories of people rescued from sure death challenge our thinking about what is possible. Perhaps, we ask ourselves what we would have done in similar circumstances. We marvel at people’s quiet determination to not let hard things defeat them. We admire people behind the scenes who make things happen. And we are inspired by the courage of those, who grit their teeth after some calamity in their lives and vow to continue on with help from others.

The chaos of today’s world presents us with the impossible. Some people say the world has passed some kind of tipping point and believe humanity is on a non reversible, downward path. Some of reasons they quote are renewed possibilities of nuclear war, climate change, political polarization and paralysis, an increasing gap between the few who have much and the disappearing hopes of a vast majority of people for an adequate life, and acts of  terrorism ranging from car bombs to cyber-hacking.

The end they suggest is coming is not the end-times I learned about when I was growing up in a near- fundamentalist church. It is a secular end-time that does not discriminate among Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus - or those who do not identify with any religion or do not believe there is a God.

Other people believe creative energy can be generated in all this chaos. What is demanded of us is to unleash and channel our energy into the unimagined future. These people believe we need courage to act wisely in the face of unprecedented threats to humanity and to the planet that sustains us.

Fear can motivate us into taking positive action — as stage-fright does, so common among actors and musicians. Fear also can paralyze us. Or even worse, fear can drive people to look for simple solutions to protect themselves and their kind. Solutions that pit them against anyone who disagrees or is different.

Together, we can lift broken porches that have damaged our world.

Words, Words, Words

Life happens when we plan to go one direction

and are surprised to discover ourselves

going some other unimagined direction.



As far back as I can remember, I have lived in a world of words. I do not have memories of my mother reading or my father reading anything besides the weekly local paper. My family owned only a few books. But they must have thought books were important, because they took me to the library, even before I was in school.

I would come home with armfuls of books. The armfuls became a box of books, always returned just before their due date. I poured over each one. Somehow I knew the letters on pages were important and were related to the stories in some mysterious fashion. I was so excited when I went to first grade. Now I would learn to read words.

Later in my teens, books were an escape from a less than happy childhood. Books brought me places where I thought girls could never go. I solved mysteries and became an adventurer in my heart. College meant textbooks and a much larger library filled with books on many subjects — though the bookstores we take for granted today meant I did not own any books yet, other than texts for classes.

I became an adult and moved to Washington DC, where my love affair with books grew.  Book purchases were proudly lined up in a parade on long bookshelves in our first apartment. Literature I never knew existed became part of my life. When my children were born, the tradition of boxes of library books was my legacy to them.

There was an underside to the ways I related to books. My education and work in the hard sciences taught me to think sequentially — a typical left-brain approach to reading words. Reasoning in a logical and rational manner was how I was trained to make sense of the world.

For me, words marched across pages — from left to right. Sequences of words had a particular order to them, dictated by rules about correct grammar. A person did not read words in random fashion or begin the the middle of a book. The idea of beginning on the right or at the bottom of the page was ludicrous. And it never occurred to me that I could write any of the books I loved so much!

My Protestant heritage was word-centered and nurtured by the earlier creation of the Guttenberg press — when books became available beyond monasteries' carefully preserved texts. Growing up, I knew nothing of powerful visual imagery from the first three-quarters of Christian history, portrayed in the statuary and stained glass of great European cathedrals. And earlier times, when knowledge was passed on through oral stories, cave paintings, and pictographs — and incorporation of pictorial images in the symbols of the first written languages.

When I was in Weimer, Germany, I visited a castle where Martin Luther took refuge for a time in his life. The reunification of eastern and western Germany had happened just the year before – and our tour guide through this elaborate castle spoke only German. We passed a room where Martin Luther had stood at a desk by a window, working on his translation of the Bible into German. In the hallway, under glass in a case, were some of his translated pages. I lingered there, wondering what Luther’s world was like. I thought about the momentous and radical steps he had taken with his translation. Now the Bible could be read by ordinary people, rather than hidden away the rarified world of monastery scriptoriums. 

My inner transformation took years — shifting from my left-brained perspective regarding the purpose of words and the structure of language. Old habits are hard to change! Like gardening. A person does not step into their backyard onto grass that has grown there for decades, toss some seeds across the lawn, and expect a beautiful garden of flowers and vegetables to emerge overnight. If the person believes that will happen, the person will be very, very disappointed!

A new garden needs imagination. When we moved into the house where we now live, there was no garden. The previous owners believed that “landscaping attracted mosquitoes” and the family had destroyed all of the first owner’s gardening efforts. Such an environment was a gardener’s gift to us, because this clean slate meant we could design to our hearts content. Visual images from other gardens, nursery centers, and garden catalogs fed our imaginations.

Next a “new” garden requires the hard work of digging up sod. Compacted ground needs to be dug deep and compost added. Just like my compacted soul in which latent visual gifts had been relegated to forgotten corners, in the service of cognitive, sequential reasoning.  

When (unknown to me) my interior environment was ready, I was at the point when I realized I had three loves and one of them had to go. I loved the work I did as a psychologist for over three decades. I had began writing poetry and essays. But writing in an available hour here and there did not work. And I was yearning to “play” with my camera and experiment with photography. There simply were not enough hours in a week!

After much careful consideration, I closed my private practice.  A month later I went to a week-long photography workshop, taught by Craig Blacklock, one of Minnesota’s premier nature photographers. It was a great time, However, my left brain had specific writing goals and I went home to write — not to experiment with my camera.

Instead, I wrote nothing for nine months. Photography took over my life. It was my first lesson in how I was not in charge of creative effort. Now, I realize it was about far more than discovering the depth of my love for the visual. I needed to live in a nonverbal, visual world long enough for me to learn a new way to live in my world of words.

Now, I have learned about myself that I am a highly visual person who “thinks” first in images. But my love affair with words limited me to words streaming across pages. I could write poetry only when my computer allowed me to move lines and words around on a page — or start in the middle of writing something. For me, the visual white space surrounding a poem is as important as the words themselves.  Poetry is where what is not expressed inwords may be more important — the words may be only an approximation of something much deeper.

In my garden, nothing is in rows!

Where These Essays Began

Where These Essays Began

Five or six years ago, I decided I wanted to write about how we carry our words within us — whether or not we pay attention to the actual words we say.

How many times have you told another person I love you and the words have been automatic? It isn’t that you don’t mean what you say. Rather the words have become part of a cherished relationship. Or when you have said thank-you to a wait-person in a restaurant, when your mind was focused on the person with whom you are dining. And then discover, you don’t know which person was assigned to your table when it comes time to order.

However, this kernel of my idea about the words we say kept being nudged out of the way. I exhibited my photography, published several books of poetry, learned to write op-ed articles, and began a blog. Yet, the idea would not go away and leave me alone.

This past fall, the time seemed right. Funny thing — during this period of time, I had changed. And the world around me had changed. For months, I tried to fit my idea from the past into the present. But I couldn’t make it work.

Gradually, I realized I was trying to fit a square premise into a round hole. Or to use another analogy, it was like trying to fold up an unfurled parachute in a stiff breeze. The more I tried to write, the more tangled up I got in silk and ropes.

Sometimes writing is like that. A good idea refuses to develop. The partially finished manuscript gets relegated to the back of a closet — or sometimes ceases to exist with the click of the computer’s delete button. Most writers have one or more of these failed attempts stashed away. These are the easier alternatives, because killing an idea or premise gives a writer permission to move on, after having given it a good try.

Much harder is what I decided to do. I decided to set aside what I’d written over these six months. I would go back to the original idea and begin again.

So I re-started my writing project. Hopefully not too burdened by what I already had written. The parachute? I am looking for an parachute expert who can fold the thing to fit into the little pack. Freeing me to write about a Sunday morning whim and a whole series of events that totally up-ended my life and my relationship with words.

Actually, I don’t even know whether parachutes are reusable!  

Coming soon!

During this next month, I will begin posting periodic essays, beginning with a series titled Come to the Table: A Radical Act in a Chaotic World.

I hope you will find them thoughtful and worth reading.