Yom Kippur 5781

 

Another year on the Jewish calendar has passed and this one was a doozy. I feel the need to ask for forgiveness from everyone this year. I have not been myself. Or rather I have been myself under duress. This is me running on a high level of anxiety, a reservoir of suppressed anger, and a great deal of straight-up grief. This is me taking leave of my senses, and the one I probably miss the most is my sense of humor. I apologize for not being funnier. I would like to give you a laugh because humor heals and I wish you wellness.

This year I have often not given my full attention to relationship. I have struggled to hear and respond appropriately on screenchats. My social skills have atrophied. I feel flat-footed, unintuitive, misinformed, awkward. So I ask your forgiveness on Yom Kippur. If I have hurt you, embarrassed you, or made you feel uncomfortable in the past year, forgive me.

I feel spectacularly insufficient to the task right now. The task of responding to the moment, to this phenomenal mess. The task of communicating well. The task of loving from afar. The task of resisting the powerful negative forces tearing down our society and culture. The task of not believing everything I think. The task of exercising my imagination. The task of having faith in the future. The task of feeling grateful for the present. The task of accepting human failing – mine and everyone else’s. I hope I will make a better job of it all in the coming year.

Forgive me if I have caused you harm with word or deed.

Scheherazade Project

Last night I was the featured artist on Julia Alvarez and Lisa Leibow's Scheherazade Project. Here's a link to the YouTube of my my three minutes sharing my story about my birthday quilt. The material in the YouTube is pretty much the same as my blog post about this last month so if you read the blog, this is nothing new. Scheherazade is a wonderful project and I'm happy to have been included. For the project, women writers and artists share a few minutes of their creativity as a gesture of putting positive energy into the world as we hope for the upcoming election to rescue us from the tyranny, disaster, and horror of another four years of failed leadership. As stated on the website, it's "activism through storytelling arts." Find out more at the Scheherazade website.

The Bravest Thing I Did This Year Was Have My Teeth Cleaned

What matters enough for me to risk my life or my husband’s life? A microscopic life form has forced me to ask myself this question daily. The pandemic has turned me into a first class coward. I fear coming in contact with other people. I fear leaving my house. I fear breathing at the grocery store. The bravest thing I have done this year was go to the dentist to have my teeth cleaned. I spoke at length with the hygienist before my visit to find out everything they are doing to keep their office safe and I was satisfied with their efforts. So I removed my mask and allowed the hygienist to put her hands in my mouth. Upon returning home, I distanced myself from my husband for several days. Just in case.

While nothing is guaranteed in this world, I believe that I would survive this virus with my strong immune system and overall good health. But my husband is a different story; he is in the most vulnerable demographic. If he gets the virus then the chances are far greater that he will die than that he will survive. He is a stubborn man who has eluded death often enough. I lost count years ago of the number of times he has nearly succumbed during a severe diabetic low blood sugar episode. I don’t know how many times a paramedic has told me, “his heart rate is dangerously low,” and I have replied calmly, “just give him a minute.” Therefore, I wouldn’t entirely discount his ability to kick covid. He can be shockingly hard-headed. Perhaps that would be no match for an indifferent virus. I don’t wish to find out. I also don’t care to experience covid in my own body firsthand.

During 2018 and 2019, I went to a demonstration for one thing or another pretty much every month. Women’s March (every year). Gun control. Climate chaos and environmental preservation. Immigration issues and deportations. Families separated at the border. No Bret Kavanaugh. Black Lives Matter. DACA. Preserving the ACA. Voting rights. Preserving democracy, as flawed as it may be. I went out and stood and showed my face, added to the numbers protesting, and put one foot in front of the other to claim my voice. Sometimes I went to small protests in my rural hometown and sometimes to larger ones in urban areas, such as Santa Rosa, Oakland, San Francisco, and the former INS detention center in Richmond. So many things have fallen apart in the past four years. So many losses. So much progress earned hard through pain, suffering, sacrifice, and death has been rolled back with the stroke of a pen, the careless utterance of a word. Of course I am aware that life is ever tenuous and fragile, but it astonishes me how much unraveling, how much reverse evolution has occurred, or was even possible. The speed and ease with which hard-earned advances have been erased takes my breath away. Whatever happened to lasting change?

A few weeks ago, a friend in England sent a commiserating email expressing sympathy for our woes in America with the lack of leadership and spiraling disaster that has befallen our country. He said, “I hope you are able to remain calm.” I laughed out loud. Calm? CALM?! Before covid I was in the streets. I called congressional offices, emailed senators, wrote postcards to leadership, demonstrated, marched, wrote articles, helped organize, and spoke out at events. I am exhausted and feel as though I am hanging on by my fingernails until November and clinging to the hope that the election will bring a change. But there are no guarantees.

In 2020 this scourge arrived, and I have rarely attended a protest in person since (and then only small local events while wearing a mask and standing apart). These days my activities are restricted to things I can do from home. If not for the pandemic, perhaps I would have gone to Portland to don a yellow T-shirt (even though it’s not my best color) and protest with the Wall of Moms. Attending any demonstration that could turn ugly is particularly dangerous for me because I can’t hear well enough to figure out what’s going on around me half the time. Would I have risked it? I don’t know. I do know that the courageous, fierce woman I once was who went to jail to protest nuclear weapons is hiding behind a facemask these days. So I call the offices of Republican senators after hours and rant like a crazy woman on their answering machines. Obviously this is more for my benefit than anyone else’s. It makes me feel like I didn’t just roll over quietly.

In the first volume of his Southern Reach sci-fi trilogy, Jef Vandermeer writes “The madness of the world tries to colonize you from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.” Oh yes. My mind has been colonized and with each passing day I have more difficulty envisioning a different reality. Hope is no longer enough. I must find my way to faith, to the ability to believe without evidence that my belief has any basis. Dr. King said that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. Does it? I must have faith that it does, because I see no proof of that. I must believe that Voldemort won’t win this battle. I must have faith that with or without my voice in the crowd and my feet on the ground, the good, the right, and the just will prevail. I would prefer to raise my voice and put my feet on the ground, but in the present situation that will not occur. John Lewis sure set the bar high. While I have done a few courageous things in my life of which I remain proud, I would have been too terrified to walk the Pettus Bridge. The most courageous thing I have done recently is to have my teeth cleaned. Now at least I can bare my teeth proudly and fiercely when roused to anger. But I am a coward. I will not risk it all to save it all. Forgive me.

65th Birthday Quilt

Last August, as my 65^th birthday approached, I asked the members of my immediate family to each give me a half a yard of brightly colored 100% cotton fabric as a birthday gift. I explained that I would use the fabric to make myself a quilt. I have made quilts for others for new babies, graduations, and weddings; but I had never made a quilt for myself.

 The fabrics they gave me are exquisite and in many instances quite representative of those who selected them. My son who has a passion for anime gave me fabric covered in Totoros (a famous Hayao Miyazaki character) that he special ordered from Japan. My daughter-in-law the florist chose a fabric that features flowers. My grandson who adores anything that “goes” chose a print with cars and airplanes. My son the musician chose a woven fabric, which I feel represents the action of weaving his musical competitions from different strands of sound. His girlfriend is an artist who does a lot of printmaking and she gave me a fabric that’s a print. I also received bright purple fabric from my husband and bright orange from my daughter. From these raw materials provided, I pieced my personal story cloth of family, home, ancestry, land, and the fruition of a decades-long marriage to my husband, keeper of my heart.

The quilt contains my family’s gifted fabrics as well as fabrics I have used in the past to make quilts for lifecycle events, fabrics handed down to me by my mother and grandmother, and fabrics taken from clothes I wore when pregnant and during my years raising my children. The square representing my baby grandson is made from the fabrics I used to make his baby quilt. 

One square features a Hmong story cloth given to me as a farewell gift when I left a city job that I loved to move to my home in the country. The Hmong historically have no written language. They preserve the narratives of their lives and history through story cloths. The one included in my quilt depicts their grief when forced to leave their ancestral home and the plants, animals, and natural environment they cherished. I identify with this loss. It grieved me to leave my home in the forest where I raised my children when Ron and I accepted the limitations brought on by age and moved into town. It will always grieve me. 

The individual quilt squares represent my husband, my three children, my daughter-in-law, my youngest son’s girlfriend, my two grandsons, my matriarchal ancestors, and the home I left in the forest. One additional square represents future grandchildren I may have. The Hmong story cloth that resonates with me provides the final square to make one dozen. 

I pieced the quilt (top and bottom) and then I paid a quilter to stitch the quilting using a computer program on a long-arm sewing machine. The quilting pattern I chose is hands. You can see them more clearly on the back of the quilt than on the front. Finally, I sewed the binding by hand to complete the project. 

It has been nearly a year since I turned 65. My birthday gift was both the process of making my own story cloth and the finished product. When I wrap myself in my birthday quilt, I feel embraced by family, home, land, and personal history. It comforts me in these miserable times we are living through and helps me cling to hope for a better future. May love wrap us in its embrace and save us all.

This Is Not the Apocalypse

Quite a few people have taken to saying they are living in the apocalypse. These may be miserable times but it’s more than an exaggeration to characterize our present situation as the apocalypse. This doesn’t look like the end of days to me. I have developed a brief quiz to help you determine if you are living in an apocalypse or not.

1) Do you have access to food and potable water?

2) Do you have a safe and sheltered place to sleep at night?

3) Have you seen a tree lately?

4) Do you have electricity in your home?

5) Are you able to communicate with distant loved ones using an electronic device?

6) Was your trash collected at curbside as regularly scheduled?

7) Can you flush your toilet?

8) Have you been attacked by giant mutant wolves?

9) Have you seen aliens in your attic?

10) Have you noticed any dead bodies lying about in your neighborhood?

11) Have you found yourself interacting with a different version of yourself from another space-time continuum?

12) Do you suspect you or someone you know is a zombie?

I’ve made my point. Case closed.

Granted, we are experiencing a number of post-apocalyptic scenarios that contribute to people describing this as the apocalypse. These scenarios include 1) people dying of plague and 2) an ignorant, degenerate president and his military bullies committing violence against our country’s own citizenry, commonly referred to as fascism. But I wish to point out that I am not eating acorns and dandelion greens yet. Many people have apparently mistaken this historical moment for the apocalypse. Consider this moment as an awakening instead. It’s a catalyst for us to think about what we cherish and want to fully appreciate in case the systems do fully collapse and humans vanish from Earth in massive numbers, or entirely. Consider this a moment of reckoning, to motivate us to make the changes necessary to avert an apocalyptic full collapse.

Some days as I swim to consciousness from sleep, I wonder what planet I’m on. After six months of only seeing one another on screenchat, my three-year-old grandson and I finally, joyfully, saw one another in person when my husband and I drove (taking precautions en route) from California to Oregon for a recent visit. When we arrived at my grandson’s house, we emerged from the car and walked over to him in the front yard. He looked us up and down and asked, “How did you come to Earth?” While I can’t truly know what he meant by that or what he perceived in his toddler mind, I imagine he wondered how we got out of the computer and landed in his yard in flesh and blood. I replied “Greetings Earthling.” While I might wish I could go home to a different planet, I remain deeply earthbound in a vulnerable human body.

This virus has laid us humans low, but it has not killed all of us off, and our systems still work even if not as well as they once did. Many of our systems, such as the healthcare system and the economic system (that has resulted in egregious income inequality), never did work. But a full systems collapse of the magnitude of an apocalypse has not happened. It may feel like an apocalypse to people at ground zero of the pandemic. But, face it, we know well that a full-on apocalypse would be exponentially worse than this.

This not-apocalypse simply poses new challenges and requires that people learn to adapt, and, dare I suggest, use their creativity. Humans need to care, think, innovate, and imagine. We need to rise to the occasion. We need to change. Americans don’t have a good track record when it comes to these kinds of things. The inconveniences, challenges, and tragedies of the present situation do not an apocalypse make. For example, a failed trip to the grocery store is not apocalyptic. Yes, I am going to share this story because that is how I wish to work through the trauma of a singularly dreadful morning food shopping. Last week when I went to my local natural foods store, I discovered a sign on the door informing me that they had closed because two employees had tested positive for the coronavirus. They would remain closed until all employees could be tested and the store could be deep cleaned. So I reluctantly proceeded to a grocery store that carries many natural and organic products. I don't know my way around that store, and consequently it took me a long time to shop. I had to locate my preferred products and had to make many substitutions. I was finally almost done shopping when I went to the restroom, and in the time it took me to sanitize my hands, my shopping cart disappeared! After looking for it myself for a few minutes with no luck, I spoke to an employee. Several employees then helped me comb the store for the cart but we couldn’t find it. If this were a real apocalypse, my cart would have been abducted by aliens or I would discover that I had made a space-time continuum leap. In the not-apocalypse, I had to do my shopping all over again. Two hours after I entered the store (or perhaps two hundred years in a different space-time continuum), when I got to the checkout stand, a store employee came over to tell me that they had just discovered that another shopper had taken my cart, thinking it was hers. How senile was she? My cart was fully loaded with a week’s worth of groceries. How could she possibly mistake all the items in that cart for her own? Was she me in a different space-time continuum? Possibly, because I never saw her. Did it seriously take her an hour to realize it was the wrong cart? Honestly, a real apocalypse would go unnoticed in this country because America is basically already full of zombies.

The frustrations of my ill-fated shopping trip, caused by the coronavirus situation, do not match the horror of a full-on apocalypse. Let’s all take a step back and recognize that things could be considerably worse. Even so, I’m hanging on by my fingernails until the election in the expectation that we might have some actual leadership waiting in the wings to step up in 2021. After four years of this mayhem, rampant ignorance, injustice, catastrophe, death, and fascism, I’m exhausted. If an actual apocalypse occurs, I wish to go gently in my sleep to a surprisingly marvelous afterlife with no zombies. Either that or send me through a space-time continuum vortex to eighteenth century Scotland with the characters in Outlander where I will happily finish out my days drinking excellent Scotch, cooking and baking for my favorite fictional people, spinning wool, and cultivating a Scottish accent. Aye, I am a fan. Outlander helps me survive the pandemic, economic meltdown, long-overdue reckoning with racial injustice, and threat of a fascist dictatorship. Pass the whiskey. Sláinte.