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Nurturing Darkness

(An interlude before we go on discussing constant change):

One of my readers commented on the use of the term “dark” to describe “dark energy” in my last blog.

The term “dark energy” is a scientific one, not my own term.  We can see “light energy” so the energy we cannot see must be “dark energy”.  Scientists’ mathematical calculations say it’s there even though we can’t see it.  There is nothing negative about dark energy.  It is neither good nor bad.  It just is.

However, I am disturbed at the suggestion that darkness might imply evil.  Darkness as a symbol of evil has been used allegorically a lot, but this use has had some very bad consequences.  Much of the racism in this country is enhanced by this false allegory.  Are dark people evil?  No.  Is night evil?  Is winter evil?  No.  These are very important parts of the natural cycle of life on this earth.

I once wrote a song on this subject.  The words are:

In the dark of winter
the bulbs and the seeds
lay deep in the nurturing earth.
It’s a time of renewal,
a time of sleep
awaiting the promise of birth.

In the dark of night
we go to our beds
gather new strength in our dreams.
Its a time of rest,
a time to sleep
awaiting the sun’s morning streams.

In the dark of her womb
she carries her babe
who grows in life every day.
It’s a time of growth,
of nurturing hopefor our children will show us the way.

Come new life
come out of the dark
rise to the promise of spring
Come new life
come out of the warmth
see what the new life will bring.

Awaken my soul
come out of the dark
rise to the promise of  dawn.
Awaken my soul
come out of the warmth
see how the day is reborn.

Nurturing darkness is where we are renewed.  It is the silence, where, if we listen, new ideas, aha moments come dropping in.  It seems to me, if  “dark energy” is indeed the connecting force between us (and, again, I leave this idea to my Don’t Know Mind), it is well named.

Next week:  Back to finding an anchor in this constant change!  Or “Don’t fence me in!”

My book, Dancing the Deep Hum, goes into this concept of dark energy in a touch more detail.  You can learn more about the book and my other writings at www.deephum.com.  You can purchase Dancing the Deep Hum online at Lulu.com, Amazon, or Powells, or order it from your local bookstore.

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Disposable People (in a Throwaway World)

Hello blogging friends,

It’s been a long time since I ‘ve posted to this blog, but I’ve been very busy writing a new poem, setting it as a blues song, and then struggling with recording it myself. I’ve included the song and the words below, and I do hope if any of you are singers, and find yourself interested in singing this song, you will contact me!

The song, Disposable People (in a Disposable World), was written after the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen last December. Since then things have gotten drastically worse. We have incredibly disastrous floods in Pakistan, India, and China, a killing heat wave in Russia, drought in Niger (and many other places), to list only a few. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area we’ve had the coldest summer since 1972. In other places it’s been much hotter than usual. In Greenland, a huge chunk of glacier has fallen into the sea, threatening the sea lanes. This fall meteorologists have predicted a very bad hurricane season because the water temperatures are much higher.

And yet, the United States, the country that contributes the most to global warming, still refuses to sign the Kyoto Protocol. Instead, our government has made attempts to get other countries like Ecuador and Bolivia to sign on to the US’s own much reduced agreement (that effectively sabotaged the Copenhagen conference) by threatening to curtail aid to those countries. (The President of Ecuador responded by refusing to be either threatened or bribed, and offering instead, to pay the US the same amount of money if they would sign the Kyoto Protocol!)

In the past when I’ve started feeling helpless faced with global warming, war, and the self-destructive greed of humans, I’ve always thought about the smallness of the earth in the vastness of the universe as a kind of solace – a concept you will hear in the song. But the other day my friend Amy said to me, “But we don’t know what effect the death of the earth will have on the universe. It might be like the flap of a butterfly’s wings….” No solace left.

Click the link below to hear the song. Also wanted to let you know that my book, Dancing the Deep Hum, is on sale on my website only for $12 (rather than $18 on Amazon, etc.).  To find out more go to www.deephum.com .

Song:  Disposable Peo 8 10 10 mix_2

The words are below.

Disposable People
(in a Throwaway World)
Dedicated to the memory of Andrea Lewis of KPFA

Planets dance around their orbits
Comets fly through space
Stars explode with shattering flame
Born anew they wax and wane
It’s all relative they say
Even if the earth dies,
Melting away ‘til it’s dry,
Stars will be alive.

And yet, and yet, I cannot reconcile
The life of one small child.

When rainfall drops
by forty percent in Darfur
Drought and famine lead to massacre.
Add the minerals for I-Pods,
Blackberries and more
Bringing more conflict and civil war.
Disposable people in a throw away world.

Collateral damage is the word we use.
Death of innocents in war.
But there is another war we wage
Where collateral damage is the rage.
War for profits for the few.
It’s all related, don’t you know?
Buying stuff, selling stuff, takes a toll.
What we’ve sold is our soul.

We’ve sold our soul.

And yet, and yet,I really don’t want to see
The death of the Maldives.
Thirty-nine nations,
Island nations
Swept away by the sea.

It’s all related, don’t you know?
Buying stuff, selling stuff, takes a toll.
What we’ve sold is our soul.
We’ve sold our soul.

Eleven thousand people live in Tuvalu.
No major industry.
Little carbon pollution.
Living the way we all should.
What did they ever do?
But the seas wash higher,
The seas grow warmer,
Cyclones grow fiercer
Every year.
It won’t be long
Before they disappear,
Like Lohachara,
Gone now.
Lohachara,
Lohachara
Musical sound.
Lohachara has drowned.

Planets dance around their orbits
Comets fly through space
Stars explode with shattering flame
Born anew they wax and wane
It’s all relative they say
Even if the earth dies,
Melting away ‘til it’s dry,
Stars will be alive.
We’ve sold our soul.

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An Open Letter to President Obama

Note: Some of my readers took me to task about this post (comments) suggesting that I wasn’t being fair to President Obama.  Perhaps they are right and I was too hard on him.  I was angry.  So bear that in mind, read the comments, and take it all with a grain of salt.

In your speech today at Oslo receiving the Nobel Peace prize you spoke of having a “clear eyed” look at the needs of the world.  But the speech itself made it clear that either you don’t have a “clear eyed” look yourself or you are simply spinning words together to cover a war mongering heart.

You speak of “moral compass”, but I wonder if you have lost yours.

You suggest that the moral principle of all religions, to do unto others as you would have them do unto yourself, should be paramount.  Clearly then, we must want Afghani and Pakistani people to send unmanned drones into our homes and market places, our weddings.

You speak of “enlightened self-interest”.  I see plenty of self-interest on the part of the large corporations and oil industry, the weapons industry, but nothing about this is enlightened.  You dare to speak of “human folly” and do not include yourself, and yet you have become the major “fool” of the corporations.

You speak of the “world rallying around us” in Afghanistan and during the Kuwaiti war.  Like most elites you seem to think that the moneyed people of the world encompass the whole world.  You seem to think that the northern nations are the “world” and to forget the southern ones.  Like so many others, the poorer people of the world are not real to you.  They are the disposable ones.  They haven’t been “rallying around”, but you don’t seem to notice.

And, too, many of us who are a part of those northern nations, many of us who are United States citizens, did not “rally” around the war in Kuwait or the war in Afghanistan.

You speak of civil wars where a government is warring against its own citizens and yet you are willing to continue warring against those same citizens in Afghanistan, and your own citizens in this country.  This morning, interspersed with your speech, was an emergency call by our local food pantry for blankets because there is not enough room in the shelters for all the people who are homeless and cold.   You think it is not warring against your own citizens when you spend trillions of dollars on war and wall street and don’t seem to have enough to provide the basic needs of your own citizens?  (Not to speak of the thousands of people in jail who really just needed a better education, more medical and psychological care, etc., all of which could be paid for by one tenth of the amount of money spent on “defense” in this country.)

You speak of civil wars in countries like Somalia and seem blind to the causes of these wars, the rape of their countries by colonization, the continued rape by large corporations.  If we want the wars to stop we must stop our exploitation of these people.

You speak of us as if we were the “peace keepers” of the world.  The wars we make have nothing to do with keeping peace for the people of the world.  We are nothing but hired mercenaries for the large corporate interests.

You say that peace requires sacrifice!  Yes,  but it is the corporations, the oil industry and the weapons industry who are the ones who need to sacrifice!  Not our young men and women, not the citizens of Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, not our poor, not our education system, not the very well being of the earth itself which you will allow these same major corporations to kill with their wanton disregard of the needs of our planet.

Take a deep breath, everyone — including me!  Let it out with a sigh.  Shake a hand, and then another one, shake everything and do a little babbling to let out those frustrations! (For more on breathing, shaking and babbling to to www.InterPlay.org. )

Want to read more of my “humble” (or  not so humble today!) ideas about how to live in the world?  Go to www.deephum.com to learn more about my books, poetry and music.

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Running Internal Scripts

Racism permeated our childhood
A muddy stream constant through our lives
Crying out to our innocence with its painfulness
Interfering with our friendships
Seen clearly in our child-eyes as the wrong it was
Murdering the purity of our souls.
(Tyler, Humming on the High Wire, 30)
(Tyler, Dancing the Deep Hum, 62)

Last post, just as I was talking about the “script” we have that says people shouldn’t complain about being victimized; they should just ‘grow wings’, another old script came popping up out of the ether.

An article circulated through Facebook about a justice of the peace in Louisiana who refused to marry an interracial couple.  His excuse?  It would be hard on any children they might have.  “He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society.” (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33332436/ns/us_news-race_and_ethnicity/?ocid=twitter)

We all have scripts running in our head especially from things we heard as a child, but also from messages we’ve heard repeated over and over again on TV, in both ads and shows, in church, at schools, and in organizations we belong to.  This justice’s comment is one of those scripts I heard many times as a child and young adult.

One friend, who probably had not heard this script before, questioned whether or not this was really racist.  He felt the justice had thought it through and believed that he was doing the right thing for the children.

Of course, many racists believe that they are right, that “separation of the races” is the way things should be.

What makes this action racist is not that he believed he was right, but that he had motives that came as a result of an attitude that white and black “races” should be kept separate.

I’m sure this justice isn’t living totally isolated from what is going on in the rest of this country.  In the movies, on TV, in magazines and in the newspapers, interracial couples, and their offspring, abound.   Our own president is the offspring of an interracial couple.

All of these folks are, for the most part, accepted in both the black and white worlds, and indeed those worlds overlap far more than they did when I first heard this “script” back in the fifties.  The prevalence of interracial children has done a great deal to further this overlapping of societies.

So, in 2009, the argument doesn’t make any sense, if it ever really did.

When I first heard this script the social climate did sometimes make it hard for interracial couples and their children.  But because we rose up, black and white together, to fight against racism, the world changed, drastically.  So now the argument is just a “script” left running around in people’s heads.

How subtle, how hidden even from our own awareness are our reactions when judging others.  There are lots of scripts about other people hidden in our subconscious minds.  They pop randomly into our consciousness when we encounter people of different ethnic groups, different religions, with physical differences, etc.  Even though we don’t like to admit it, if we are truthful we all know it is true.

We didn’t create the scripts and we usually, dearly, don’t want them there, but we can’t erase them, only recognize them and reject them as they pop up, and, most importantly, refuse to perpetuate them by letting our children hear them.

I have learned when the script from some inane television ad for something that is not good for me pops into my head, to “just say no!” (A useful “script”!)  That’s because I recognize the ad script for what it is.

We have to learn to recognize the racist, elitist, stereotyping scripts that are around (and unfortunately “in”) us and say no, no, no to them, sometimes over and over again.

And in the case of the justice of the peace we need to go farther.  What he did is against the law.  We need to say, “No, no, no, you can no longer hold this office.”

Take a deep breath.  Let it out with a long sigh.  Shake one hand and then the other.  Shake your whole body.  Let my ideas dance in your head and through your body.  If they sit well, keep them.  If not, throw them out! (For more information on deep breaths, sighs, and shaking go to InterPlay.org)

You can find more about my experiences with racism in my book, Dancing the Deep Hum, One woman’s ideas on how to live in a dancing, singing universe! You can learn more about this book and my other writings at www.deephum.com.  You can purchase Dancing the Deep Hum online at Lulu.com, Amazon, or Powells, or order it from your local bookstore.

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Not So Little Boxes

Last post I talked about our love/hate relationship with the personal boxes we put ourselves in.  But there are some socially imposed boxes that we are put in because of our race, our culture, our religion, our physical makeup, etc. that carry with them stereotypes of behavior and expectation that are even harder to escape.

Remember the folk song about the calf “bound for market” who is told by the farmer to stop complaining.  “Who told you to be a calf?  You should be like the swallow and have wings.”  I always loved this song, but recently I’ve begun to see the subtle irony in the story.

I identify with the calf, not the farmer, or the swallow.

Why is this?   Is it because there is an unwritten subtext in the song?  Probably.

Calves don’t have a choice to grow wings and fly away.  The only way the calf is going to escape being sold and slaughtered is if there is outside intervention.  That’s not the calf’s fault.  If we look at it from this point of view, the song, using the voice of the calf’s exploiter — the farmer — is blaming the victim for his victimhood.  The farmer has put the calf in a box that says, “All calves are meant for slaughter.”

This was not the original intention of the author, Aaron Tsaytlin (1899-1974).  The song was written in Yiddish during the Nazi era and translated into English first by the composer of the music, Sholom Secunda, and later by Arthur Kevess and Teddi Schwartz.

There is no voice of the farmer in the original translation.  The song is written from the point of view of the calf who asks the wind, “Why can’t I fly like the swallow, why did I have to be a calf?”  The wind replies, “Calves are born and soon are slaughtered with no hope of being saved.  Only those with wings like swallows will not ever be enslaved.”  The voice of the wind is not the voice of an exploiter, but a neutral voice.  It seems to be saying, “This is the way things are.”  This doesn’t blame the victim, but it also leaves the victim feeling pretty hopeless! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Donna)

Interestingly, the second English translation, the one written from the farmer’s point of view, was written in 1956, after the defeat of the Nazis.

There is a “script” in our society that says that people shouldn’t complain about being victimized.  They should just “grow wings” and pull themselves out of the situation, out of poverty, out of racism, and all the myriad other deep mires people find themselves in.  In other words, if you are victimized, it’s your own fault and it’s okay to exploit you!

In the case of calves, it is obvious that we humans, born with physical advantages that privilege us and make us able to exploit the calves, are the only ones who can help them escape their circumstances.  In Dancing the Deep Hum when talking about this song I said:

….. I [can’t] help but imagine a stampede of cattle rising up against their human oppressors.
Mad cows, rather than mad cow disease!   (DDH, p 86)

We all know hundreds of “scripts”, stereotypes, boxes that people are placed in because of their race, religion, country of origin, size, age, etc.   Even those  who happen to be born with privilege are put in a box which makes it easy for them to fall into the role of exploiter, a box that can also be difficult to break out of!

We all of us, exploited and exploiter, need to be willing to ask for, and offer, help to break the boxes of stereotype we find ourselves in.   Frankly, I think if we can’t find ways to do this our world doesn’t have much hope of surviving.

How do we deal with this hard stuff?  Take a deep breath, let it out with an audible sigh!  Shake out one hand, and then another!  Shake yourself all over!  Let out another deep sigh and head out into the world!  (For more about sighing and shaking go to InterPlay.org!)

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Little Boxes

Back to the third principle of Deep Hum Dancers:

Life is constant change, both externally and internally, … bits and pieces of the rest of the universe are constantly moving in and out of our “selves” bringing new information and insight and helping us grow into more connected beings.”

In Dancing the Deep Hum (DDH) I say:

Everything is constantly changing.  There is no such thing as an unchanging individual!  How we hate this!  We are   constantly trying to tie ourselves down, trying to find out “who we are”.  We crave doing self revealing questionnaires like the Myer Brigs tests, the Enneagram, horoscopes, and the four dancer types, etc., that tell us who we are.

[And then there are the quizzes on Facebook!  What Disney character are you, etc.  We all know that these quizzes are written by people with no specific knowledge of how to ask questions that will lead to relevant results, and yet we still take the quizzes!]

Is this an attempt to find an anchor in this constant change?  It can be useful, helpful — I always found doing Tarot readings for myself to be helpful in the moment — but we must be careful to keep it from being a box that doesn’t allow change.  “I’m this way because my horoscope says so.   I can’t help it.  You just have to live with that.”  Or, “You are an Aquarius.  That’s why you’re the way you are.”  I hate that! (DDH p 84)

Oh, so I guess I also hate the thought that I might not be allowed to change, as much as the idea that everything changes!  An understandable contradiction.

And in truth, most of the long term (legitimate, not Facebook!) systems of structuring and labeling behavior types have in them a built in concept of the personality as something that changes, but we often see only the “types” and ignore the aspect of change.

In the field of education we find these labels to be very useful, to a point.  The “point” is where we make them a fence or wall rather than a tool for growth and change.

As a teacher I often note that a particular child is a strong visual, or auditory, or kinesthetic learner.  This is good because I know how to best gear my teaching to this child.

But it also tells me something else.  It tells me what learning styles I need to help this child strengthen so that she will be able to learn from all the different modalities, not just her strongest one.   Over time the relative strength of our different modalities shifts as we learn more about using them.

Sometimes I think that in our new enthusiasm to find ways to reach children who are not strong visual learners (the modality our schools have most often taught from in the past), we forget that we also need to help them become more skilled in visual learning; and even more often we forget to help our visual learners become more skilled auditory and kinesthetic learners!  The strongest learner is the one who can use all of these modalities.  I teach piano and it’s very clear that a pianist needs to be able in all these learning styles.

But it is also true for everything else we do even if it is not as obvious.

We need to be able to “think” with every cell, every muscle of our bodies! (How?  Go to InterPlay.org)

So, while we are striving to find out “who” we are, we need to remember that tomorrow we might be someone who is just a little different from the person we were yesterday.  We are constantly changing and we need to embrace that change and be excited about the endless possibilities of who we will be next.

Next week, stereotyping.  Putting others in a box.

My book, Dancing the Deep Hum, speaks about how to cope with constant change as well as many other things.  You can learn more about the book and my other writings at www.deephum.com.  You can purchase Dancing the Deep Hum online at Lulu.com, Amazon, or Powells, or order it from your local bookstore.