I grew up in the Arizona desert and it has always been one of the places where I can re-center with the mystery. The spirit of the Grandmothers seems palpably alive when you listen to the stillness in the desert sun.
For many years now, the desert has been under stress from over-development but on a recent trip home I found the Phoenix valley blanketed with foreclosure signs that tell the sorry tale and on the plane home this is what came to me:
Desert heartbeat
Throbbing faintly below the
Glass and concrete
Jutting up,
Unnatural, fatal wounding.
Endstage foreclosed wilderness upon
The wildness that once was.
Transplantation finally rejected,
Unwelcome parasite defeated by itself.
Desert mirage rising up from
Heated sand.
Clarity returns beneath the
Azur sky.
The other evening I sat on my patio and listened to the stillness of the approaching night. I wanted to meditate about balance, or more to the point I suppose, the lack thereof that seems to challenge us on a daily basis.
There were 2 crickets, one would chirp and then the other, taking turns, it seemed that they were quite courteous, each waiting until the other had finished. It seemed a fitting chorus for my meditation. Slowly my ears detected the sound of children playing down the block, their laughter made me smile. And then I began to hear the noise of the nearby streets although I hadn’t heard that at first. Not such a fitting chorus as the crickets, but certainly symbolic of the problem.
The equinox marks a point of equality between the day and night, a moment of celestial balance and in many parts of the world, the beginning of the harvest season and a period of gratitude. Here in the Northern Hemisphere it marks the beginning of longer nights that envelope us with a physical darkness that seems to ask us to look within for our own strength. It is a time to re-center.
Below are a few quotes that resonate for me. Please feel free to share your own thoughts about balance and gratitude in the comments.
We do not give so that we will receive, we give in gratitude because we have already received–from our mothers, from others, and from the earth—in a circle that goes back to the beginning of time.
As the wheel turns from summer to fall, it is time to give thanks for all that Beautiful and Bountiful Earth has given to us. And to think of what we can give back to the earth and to those who have generously shared its abundance with us.
(W)hat we face is not unique. We are not the first generation to have to deal with “the dark hurlings of nature” although we may be the first to have brought it upon ourselves.
It is no accident that time and again earth is compared to the human body. Our planet like us is a living system – its ecosystems like our circulatory and endocrinal systems rise and fall responding to the events taking place on its surface and in its interior spaces. This is not a romantic idea of mine, it is metaphoric, but no less real for being so.
Our human experience suggests such metaphors to us as we grapple with ways of understanding our selves and our relationship to the world whether it be earth as body, wind as breath, the great flows of rivers, oceans and lava as tears and blood, grass and trees as hair and limbs.
Yes you read that right–all the problems that stem from the corporation being treated as if it was a person, it all apparently goes back to a clerk’s error. This may rank as the single most messed up thing that ever happened in this country and the damage done is staggering. Even more astounding, don’t know about you, but I never knew this and I am learning about it on Comedy Central?
If this doesn’t scare you, nothing will. Listen to what they are saying and especially listen to their answers to the interviewer’s questions. None of this is about health care, as Jimmy Carter said at a townhall at the Carter Center in Atlanta, it is about racism.
“There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president.”
The Georgia Democrat said the outburst was a part of a disturbing trend directed at the president that has included demonstrators equating Obama to Nazi leaders.
“Those kind of things are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate on whether we should have a national program on health care,” he said. “It’s deeper than that.”
In an interview with NBC, Carter added,
“Racism … still exists and I think it has bubbled up to the surface because of a belief among many white people, not just in the south but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It’s an abominable circumstance and grieves me and concerns me very deeply.”
As the hatred ratchets up on the streets of the U.S., it is dangerously clear that this is a concerted effort to promote irrational, racist hatred to the point where one of these people will take it upon themselves to take a shot at the President. There is a large gaping wound still festering in this country and the peril of ignoring it is all too clear.
I have no idea who this woman is, but she is an American Shero for sure. Watch it, cross-post it, the revolt begins now. Many thanks to my friend Michele for passing this along.
September 14, 2009 / Lucinda / Comments Off on The STOCK Act–Demand Full Disclosure Of Congressional And Supreme Court Stock Portfolios
Here in the U.S. we have the best government money can buy. As the healthcare debate has illustrated all too well, corporate lobbying goes a long way. But the problem goes beyond that. According to a new group on Facebook, Full Disclosure of U.S. Congress/Supreme Court Stock Portfolios NOW!
a look at investments in the defense industry held by members of Congress might make you wonder just what interests our military is defending.
According to the most recent reports of their personal finances, 151 current members of Congress had between $78.7 million and $195.5 million invested in companies that received defense contracts of at least $5 million in 2006. In all, these companies received more than $275.6 billion from the government in 2006, or $755 million per day, according to FedSpending.org, a website of the budget watchdog group OMB Watch.
and,
in 2008, the Center for Responsive Politics, listed the following lawmakers as having the most money invested in companies with Department of Defense contracts:
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass) $28,872,067 $38,209,020
Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ) $12,081,050 $49,140,000
Rep. Robin Hayes (R-NC) $9,232,037 $37,105,000
Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis) $5,207,668 $7,612,653
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif) $2,684,050 $6,260,000
Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich) $2,469,029 $8,360,000
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WVa) $2,000,002 $2,000,002
Rep. Tom Petri (R-Wis) $1,365,004 $5,800,000
Rep. Kenny Ewell Marchant (R-Texas) $1,163,231 $1,163,231
Rep. John Carter (R-Texas) $1,000,001 $5,000,000
The group is calling for support of the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act (STOCK Act) which:
would prohibit Members of Congress and their staff from using nonpublic information they are able to obtain through their official positions to enrich their personal portfolios.
This is an excellent idea and deserves the support of every American.
In what at times has sounded like a script from Sesame Street, pundits and economists have endlessly engaged in speculating about whether the recession looks like the warm and fuzzy Letter U, the nasty Letter V, the even nastier Letter W, the crazy Letter X, or the dreaded Letter L. It’s enough to make you swear off Alphabet Soup forever.
Call me illiterate, but I think we’re barking up the wrong analogy, what we’ve got looks more like a roller coaster from where I sit. Think about it: the most terrifying ride in the park–you go up a little and then down, your heart lands in your stomach and you’re afraid you’re going to upchuck all over your date but then you realize that you survived and it isn’t so bad and hey you’re going up again. And then you get to the top of the next rise and see the very long and steep decline that lies ahead…
I’m no economist, but while the Cash for Clunkers program certainly helped lower car inventories and upped the average mpg of the cars on the road a tad, only 41% of the cars bought under the program were American and hey did you know that the payments are taxable? (Note–after a comment from an alert reader, see the clarification of what this means below.) Much more importantly, none of this does jack to reform our transportation policy. So now that the program is over, how long does the economic honeymoon continue? And when does an understanding of peak oil temper our Detroit at any cost mantra?
Then there is the money laundering bailout of the banks and insurance companies. Stockholders got stuck in the hot water spin cycle where their money shrank the big one leading a panicked Congress to shovel enormous amounts of money at these companies with shockingly little oversight or regulation. We don’t even know how the money was used or where it all went. And funny story, those companies that were about to plunge into the abyss and take us with them–stock prices are back up, and the CEO’s are doing quite nicely, thank you. And what exactly has been done to insure that it doesn’t happen again?
As for the foreclosure crisis–that nasty little house of cards seems to have eased. Or not. Seems there are some mortgages called Option ARMs about 70% of which will reset before 2011, some by as much as 63% leaving a whole lot more people with not much of an option but to go into foreclosure, so that one isn’t over yet either.
Those factors, and throw in the health care debacle and unemployment while we’re at it, are enough to say we’ve still got a problem but our current economic woes are only the tip of the not so proverbial iceberg. Which happens to be melting. And quickly at that.
Our national self-centered myopia when it comes to climate change and environmental peril is blinding us to the inevitable, drastic changes ahead. In the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, we believe there is such a thing as clean coal and safe nuclear energy, we blithely use pesticides and herbicides on our land and then drink them from our rivers. We poison our air and imperil our food supply by genetically modifying it and then go back to watching Mad Men or American Idol without a minute of my bad or wondering about the consequences and cost of this folly.
And costly it will be. As the healthcare ‘reform’ debate has made all too clear, we have incorporated our democracy to the point where the welfare of huge corporations is considered at least if not more important than the welfare and health of the people they supposedly serve. The same is even more true of the energy and global warming debate, witness the recent effort by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to hold a “Scopes”-like trial on global warming for the simple reason that the corporations they represent will do just about anything to keep making a buck for as long as they can, no matter the cost and heaven forbid they should be held accountable for the damage that is staring us in the face.
This head-in-the-sand state of national denial is not sustainable, it’s not even survivable and it most definitely is not profitable. Richard Power puts it quite eloquently,
(T)he climate change debate (by that I mean what to do about it, not whether it is real), is not… simply one of dire national importance, it is one of dire planetary importance, and the nature of opposition to meaningful action on climate change is not simply self-abusive, it is suicidal.
Or in the even more dire words of Johann Hari, we are at “five minutes to ecological midnight.”
Whether or not the recession is ending is irrelevant and not even the correct question. At best, we are in a bit of economic remission, but do not be deluded, the ride has only just begun, and the big fall is still ahead.
Reclaiming Medusa was born in 2005 as one of my early attempts at blogging. I regretfully gave it up when I started the Feminist Peace Network (FPN) blog, because it was one project too many. It was a necessary choice, but at the time I promised myself I would eventually get back to it. And eventually is now.
The following is an updated version of the introductory essay I wrote for the original blog, along with a postscript. What I wrote in 2005, and the necessity of the spirit of Medusa, is even more true today than it was then:
I first crossed paths with Medusa at an Audrey Flack exhibit. It was of course the hair that caught my attention, I knew immediately that this was one Goddess who refused to be defined by revisionist mythology. Medusa means sovereign female wisdom and according to Alicia Le Van’s The Gorgon Medusa, her
“mask was used to guard and protect women and the secret knowledge of the Divine Feminine. It literally warned men to “Keep Away! Female Mysteries.” It was erected in stone,(corresponding to her look of stone), on caves and gateways at sacred sites dedicated to the Goddess.”
But of course Medusa’s power was incompatible with the myths of male power that were necessary to explain the rise of patriarchy and she had to be destroyed. La Van explains,
“The mythological beheading of Medusa symbolizes the ultimate silencing of female wisdom and expression. It is the act which stops her growth, limits her potential, movement and cultural contributions. She is obliterated and her severed head is flaunted on the Acropolis and other works of art in pride of her and all women’s subjugation by violent men. She is broken and her body enslaved. Her spirit, her mind, her spiritual powers are killed. Her once honored forces of female creativity and destruction are halted. Her role as dynamic mediatrix degraded. Her life-giving, death-wielding powers and wild forces of nature are controlled, tamed, and mastered by the male order. The cycles of life and nature are made to conform to his linear perspective.”
Not so metaphorically, in both global and very personal terms, we are living the fate of Medusa. Women in particular face a relentless struggle for economic empowerment. Violence, particularly against women and children is an escalating epidemic. The right of women to control their own bodies is under siege and the degradation of this planet with all manner of chemical and nuclear poison endangers our future. We are in danger when we question the patriarchal system from which dominating power and identity are derived and when we honor the wisdom, rights and lives of women. In the face of these threats to our existence, we need to continue to relentlessly tell our stories, name our needs and speak our truths. We need to reclaim the discussion.
Postscript: In recent months I have wanted to write about a number of topics that are somewhat outside the focus of the Feminist Peace Network blog. I believe passionately that the FPN blog should continue to focus primarily on misogyny and the intersection between violence and women’s human rights, so I intend Reclaiming Medusa to be a place to explore other topics that are not a good fit for FPN.
Before undertaking this project, I gave a lot of thought to simply posting to blogs on other sites, but if there is one thing I’ve learned over the last few years, it is that it is urgently necessary for women to have their own spaces in the ever-evolving media universe and I chose to be a part of that effort.
I’m not sure yet what the rhythm of this blog will be, probably less posts than FPN and some combination of quick hits to provide links to other things that should be read and lengthier pieces when I find the time, so be patient as I find the path and feel free to offer your thoughts, they are always welcome.
Go here to learn more about me, including contact info and check the links in the sidebar for copyright and comment policies. Be sure to join the Fan page I set up on Facebook for the blog, I’ll be posting some links there to things that I think might be of interest but that I’m not going to address on the blog.
**********
Feed your soul: Click here to learn more about Goddess symbolism.
Lucinda Marshall is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Inheritance Of Aging Self (Finishing Line Press,2021) and is available for purchase from Finishing Line Press, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon. She is also a quilt, mixed media, and graphic design artist. For more information, please email LucindaMarshall @ lucindamarshall.com.
In what at times has sounded like a script from Sesame Street, pundits and economists have endlessly engaged in speculating about whether the recession looks like the warm and fuzzy Letter U, the nasty Letter V, the even nastier Letter W, the crazy Letter X, or the dreaded Letter L. It’s enough to make you swear off Alphabet Soup forever.
