Passing of The Chief

img_6863.jpgOn December 7, Friday, Pearl Harbor Day our father, Edward B. Feathers, passed away silently, peacefully in his sleep, in his easy chair, at home.

Known to his family and close friends as Talking Bear (a name given him by a friend of the family when he embarked on his five-year long, daily chat group) Dad proceeded to play on the theme of a Family Council and subsequently named each member of the online community:  Morning Star (Beverly), Laughing Waters (me), Bluebird (Barbie), and Skylark (Kathryn) – his daughters. He christened each grandchild also: He-Who-Digs (Tom), She-Who-Paints (Heather), Evening Star (Jennifer), Little Eagle (Nathan), Columbine (Amelia), and Little Bear (Liberty). Mary Hampton (his niece) and Aunt Marynelle (his only sibling) were on the Council as well as daughters of his WWII flight crew and life long friends of council members.

Each day Dad delivered the word for the day; Farmers’ Almanac, a link to a great performance, or (more likely) a link to the latest on alternative remedies for various ailments. He quoted poetry and invited council members to send their favorites. My sister Kathy inherited his gift for remembering poems and the two of them entertained us for years. Dad was a big fan of Jacquie Lawson e-cards which we all received on our birthdays, holidays, and just for fun.  At work it was great to take a moment to watch one of these beautiful renderings, with music and serendipity, and always Dad’s warm greeting.

These are the regular, simple things he did for us, that kept us all together and nourished our souls as we were out in the world with all its “slings and arrows of misfortune.”

We loved our father, this man of deep emotions never shown, of constant and steady love, and a bit of the rascal mixed in to keep the balance.

Dad had a profound influence on each of our lives and will continue to do so though he is now in another dimension. But as each day passes beyond his military burial – taps and the final words, “Please accept this flag from a grateful nation” – we are more and more in the knowledge of how much his life supported and enriched ours.

Members of the Council are casting about wondering who can take over to keep the online community going, but no one has stepped up to do so. Perhaps that is an acknowledgement that no one can take Talking Bear’s place. But I imagine after we all grieve and heal, a few of us may take up the staff to keep something like it going.

To My Dad

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost 
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

High Flyer

IMG_9975My Dad came home today from the hospital in full hospice care. He is on the “down wind leg” to use a sailing term, but in real life Dad flew bombers, and as a young teen, an old biplane in which he was smitten by the flying bug.  Maybe it was getting up over the green valleys of his Tennessee farm house, from the poverty and depression era stress that he experience as a child.  His eyes were always set on the far horizon and that dream eventually landed him in the Army Air Corps and a career as an Air Force pilot.

He is a High Flyer in many other ways, too. Though a country boy, he read Chaucer and Shakespeare and memorized the romantic poets whom he still quotes flawlessly today.  Tonight for example, through his gurgling throat, lungs filling with fluid, and an oxygen tube in each nostril, he lapped up his favorite dessert (Dutch Chocolate Ice Cream) and quoted two verses of A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

Tell me not in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou are, to dust thou returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

 

To live by moons

What would it be like to live by moons…or times of blooming, fruiting, migrations? What would it be like to know only what your eyes can see, fingers touch, the tongue to taste? To be prey and see oneself as another of the animals, a part of the garden? Was the Old Testament’s parable of Adam and Eve about that break? The tree of knowledge being a departure from an ecological mind?

Where do I live? If I had no address, as many people
do not, I could nevertheless say that I lived in the
same town as the lilies of the field, and the still
waters.
Spring, and all through the neighborhood now there are
strong men tending flowers.
Beauty without purpose is beauty without virtue. But
all beautiful things, inherently, have this function –
to excite the viewers toward sublime thought. Glory
to the world, that good teacher.
Among the swans there is none called the least, or
the greatest.
I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in
singing, especially when singing is not necessarily
prescribed.
As for the body, it is solid and strong and curious
and full of detail; it wants to polish itself; it
wants to love another body; it is the only vessel in
the world that can hold, in a a mix of power and
sweetness: words, song, gesture, passion, ideas,
ingenuity, devotion, merriment, vanity, and virtue.
Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
(Evidence)

Jack Kerouac in Florida

Florida is still a mysterious place to me. It may be red neck, a senior haven, conservative, environmental disaster, but it is also sophisticated, energized, liberal, and gorgeous country more varied than any state in the union.  I have discovered to my surprise that Florida is a haven for great writers. Riding home last night our public radio,WUWF,  featured Bob Kealing—an Emmy award-winning journalist and author. Kealing wrote Jack Kerouac in Florida: Where the Road Ends to chronicle events in Kerouac’s life that are little known. Kealing as journalist found people who were close to Kerouac and was able to find manuscripts and letters that fill in blanks in the life of the beat generation’s guru. He also helped establish the Jack Kerouac house and writer’s residence in Orlando where Kerouac lived with his mother. Explore this site and then listen to Bob Kealing’s 25 minute presentation at University of Central Florida where he talks about how he found the Kerouac materials and the establishment of the Jack Kerouac house.

Voting in Little Earth of United Tribes

New Yorker Article by Louise Erdrich about voting “in Little Earth of United Tribes” –  a Native-preference housing development within the larger city of Minneapolis. Read this to experience the local democratic spirit among America’s tribal communities where the spirit of democracy thrives. On this granular level Erdrich delivers oh so well—kids standing in long lines in the dark, waiting to vote; Erdrich buying pizzas (“they were low on grease”); brought down to street level, to rural  country roads and hamlets. Feel the power of the vote as they are delivered where “little old grandmothers” serve cupcakes and coffee and voting booth drapes match the window curtains…where someone turns on the headlamps of their truck to light up the voting place for the latecomers. Its the real stuff from one of our country’s outstanding writers.  Miigwechiwendan

Who We Are

A writing project is filling my free time and thoughts when not working at something else, cleaning or taking care of business: exploring seven works of fiction that each deals with the relationship of Native Americans and European Americans. The works were written between 1940 and 2012.  Three are written by Europeans (Iola Fuller, Margaret Craven and Geraldine Brooks), and four by authors whose ancestries include indigenous grandparents or parents (Waters, Silko, Alexie, and Erdrich).

Each story is set in a different area of the United States with historical time ranging from 1808 to 2012. As I have reread them, studied them, learned more about each author (online interviews, family member’s recollection, and formal research) I deepen my understanding of my country, of me, and our historic relationship to people of non-Anglo descent.

Why is this so important to me? It concerns my life-long puzzle over my culture’s exploitation of nature for profit and for power. Until I was 30 I never associated that exploitation with oppression of people whose nature is close to the earth: indigenous societies, women, African-American slave cultures and children. A realization came to me this morning as I considered these relationships in light of the long history of the human culture. Recent mitochondrial DNA research traces modern people back to a common matrilineal line in Africa about 175,000 years ago. Researchers trace migrations of these descendents into a world-wide migration, the formation of ethnic groups across the world. This took place over millennia and there are a lot of uncertainties but the general phenomenon is corroborated by different lines of research, and the more people learn about their individual DNA linkages, this picture will become more accurate. In the meantime the fact that ethnic groups no longer recognize their common origins is tragic and has led to war, oppression, hatred, and ongoing misunderstanding about our common humanity.

The degradation of natural resources arises in the context of these misunderstandings at a deep personal level. I had never made that connection and this is what I hope to write about in my new book, Who We Are.

Put on a pot of coffee…

It is a soft quiet Sunday on the Gulf coast. Downtown the annual arts festival must be a busy,  and the time when artists realize in the last few hours that its time for a sale! Out on the barrier island of Santa Rosa the beachcombers are luxuriating in a November day in the 80s.  Bet the water is tourmaline emerald. King and Spanish mackerel are being hauled out over the Pensacola Beach Pier and dolphins and reds are teasing the fishermen.

I’m home atop my upstairs condo with a view of old oaks and blue sky filling with white stratus clouds. I feel a change.  The last few days of cloudless, warm easy days may be on their way out chased by the Polar Express.

On my mind are friends and family and Americans in the Northeast in devastating circumstances who are trying to heat a cup of coffee, stay warm, and wonder whether they’ll work tomorrow or kids to school. The heavy realizations crowd in on us: we  are naked and unprepared for the storms on our horizon.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow, with our sense of being exceptional, to respond to the call to refrain or curtail our fossil-fuel addiction. We’ve had nearly 50 years to seriously think of it and do something but we have not. Now that sinks into the national consciousness with the familiar boardwalk caving into the sea.

Each time a disaster happens there is an opening, because “things as usual” are paused. Into these moments of suffering and confusion are opportunities for insight and action. We’ve experienced this phenomenon personally when sickness or tragedy sweep aside the normal flow of our work and home lives; we may learn something new…or not.

For years I’ve wondered at America’s poor ability to learn from her mistakes. Great wealth and a land of abundance and a hard working people have staved off this fact. Now it sits with us, an unwelcome guest. Time is running out.

We should welcome this uninvited hulking presence, put on a pot of coffee and have a conversation. Let down the guard and fess up. It would do us good and maybe lead to some moderation in our behavior, and maybe even more.

 

Silenced by Money

This is a graph from the NOAA Cimate Change website.  See the Climate Indicators, an actively ticking measure of many indicators such as total ice shrinkage, sea level rise, etc which you can monitor.

Despite the massive investments of the disinformation conservative movement, a thinking individual – no matter what party, religious orientation or persuasion – cannot easily turn a blind eye to what we are witnessing in nature today.  The basic idea is that we are weakening the inherent feedback loops that have kept the biosphere in dynamic balance for at least as long as living creatures have existed on the planet.

What we are witnessing is selective intelligence by a movement of corporations and their investors who deny climate change to be able to continue exploiting the earth’s natural resources unhampered by any state or self-imposed limitations.  It is recognized that the Homo sapien has become the dominant species on earth so much so that scientists now label our era as the Anthropocene era.

The conservative think tanks and their investors have created doubt  in Americans about the truth of climate change and there is now a chilling silence about it in Congress and in the Presidential debates.  In fact if Romney and Ryan are voted into office, we will see unbridled fracking of land, including public lands, to suck out the remaining natural gas deposits to achieve energy independence.  Everyone is talking about safe processes for fracking which is laughable.  There are also a lot of “safe” processes that led to massive destruction of mountaintops in the Appalachian mountains. Fracking, which releases large amounts of methane – a heat trapping gas many times more powerful than the carbon dioxide molecule – will increase the heating in the atmosphere.

We don’t care. That is the bottom line. The march of capitalism, Big Stick diplomacy, exploitation for profit, and the brainless call for jobs, jobs, jobs at any cost has undermined reason, ethical responsibility, and stewardship of American land, water, air, and food security…at least in the Republican camp and to great extent in the Democratic ranks as well who are silenced for fear of losing votes.  All the cries for individualism at all costs and the hatred of government are radically applied as if they were one-or-the-other choices.  What ever happened to reason, to discussion and civil debate?  That question cannot be heard in the temple.

With the January 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission  corporations, and other organized political groups are able to make unlimited donations to a political campaign as long as they make no direct donations to the candidates.  Thus the tsumani of advertisements for candidates that now blanket the airways and television and the internet.  The court decided that these contributions do not lead to corruption. People can now contribute to silencing concerns about the environment and no one knows their agenda. Debate is not just tamped but eliminated conveniently.  Corruption may be developing a new definition: parading as one thing when you are entirely another.  I think we used to call it false representation.

All the previous campaign finance law, which attempted to make the playing field level and prevented special interest influences,  granting citizens some space in which to seek their own information on candidates and make their own minds up – was wiped out with the Supreme Court decision.  Now our citzenry is force-fed what to think and do. If you decide to not listen, you must literally turn off the radio, TV, and not read print news, and stay off your computer.

Corporations now vote.  Welcome to the New America brought to you by the Modern Day Tea Party, deluded into thinking they have any semblance at all to the Boston Tea Party that grew in response to British domination of American economic success.  The Tea Party, like the climate deniers, have created doubt and distrust in the government that we have all elected and that we are responsible to monitor.  It is not something that others own, it is ours and we have added government where our citizenry have not always exerted justice and generosity. When our character fails as individuals and thus our businesses or public services fail, we look to government for justice measures.  These have grown in direct relationship to the level or corruption in our society.  The corruption is the collective actions or non-actions of citizens who are not living up the the American creed.

We are now on a stampede toward a cliff and fall into ecological catastrophe.  Each of us must remember that we each have equal power to change this direction but, we must get rid of the corporotocracy that America has become.

What’s the best way to get started?  Arm yourself with a couple of questions and keep them foremost in your mind:  1) Who is speaking? 2) What do I think about that?

As a teacher once instructed me:  STOP     WAIT     CONSIDER!

That is the starting point. Vote your conscience next. Then dig in and ride your representatives to live up to their responsibilities to us. Pick one area of focus and become an absolute expert and guide others in your circle of influence. After that you’ll know what else you can do.

Money cannot define America and Americans.  Right now it does. It has to change if we are to last.

On the tranquil Gulf

I spent a glorious hour on the pier at Pensacola Beach high above the waves where you can see the curvature of the Earth on the horizon. The water was crystal clear to the white bottom.  Some people floated, suspended in air it seemed, others walked far out from shore in tourmaline to emerald hues. The whole of it had no time. Slender needlefish meandered in small schools pushing a long nose to the surface while occasional dark clouds of spawning babies twirled by under the pier and beyond – the food of the sea.

The fishermen were in dreams, the lovers strolled in silence, and the gulls and terns fell in wide turns on the invisible ocean of air, a tern diving headlong into the green sparkling jewel…

Even the hotels and noise from beachfront bars became artful additions into a masterpiece of such beauty and tranquility all present are lifted into what must be Heaven.

I come home. Was I there really? My camera is here. I download the photos. A tiny sliver of what was there is recorded for the eyes but the heart and soul remains out there, out there!