Susan Feathers

This week the universe delivered a wake up call through my sister’s recommendation that I read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.  My sister is a master teacher in a Montessori community in Brooklyn.  I respect her opinions on youth literature which we often discuss in light of how she integrates books into her 4th-6th grade curricula.  I began reading The Hunger Games a few hours ago and am engrossed in a dystopic world in which its young characters fight for their very existence through a perverse scheme by their government.  On the Scholastic website, the author’s bio states “she continues to explore the effects of war and violence on those coming of age.”

That gave me a chill.  I have wondered about growing up in a world of intimidation, fear, and violence and what kind of impact that might have on the coming generations.

It is no surprise to me that I would be directed to this story while I am reading John Haidt’s new nonfiction book, The Righteous Mind (2012), which challenges us to step outside of our political framework to examine what is moral and ethical.  Serendipity occurs even as the truth becomes increasingly hard to discern when complexity envelops every issue.  I typically turn to beacons of light, for me at least.  One is Orion Magazine which gives voice to our society’s most creative and perceptive minds, and is not afraid to explore controversial issues even as it strives to inspire community, cooperation, and celebration of all that is good and beautiful in nature and in humankind.

On Orion Magazine’s podcast “Punishing Protest: Patrick Shea and Heidi Boghosian Discuss Law and Civil Disobedience” (February 23, 2012) the speakers explore “What is the justice system for?”   This is a very intelligent discussion of  the Tim DeChristopher prosecution (Shea was his defense lawyer).  These two lawyers describe what citizens in the Occupy movement can expect from our justice system and offer them directions. Shea encourages listeners to strive on even in the milieu of government intimidation of citizen-activists who act to preserve our freedoms – to do the right thing.

So I see in these three current products of our culture – The Hunger Games, The Righteous Mind, and the Orion podcast on civil disobedience – as interrelated discussions rippling through our country, our community, our collective mind.

Have you read The Hunger Games?  If so, tell us what you think about the story.

From iris scans to drones, we are in a dramatic period of governmental oppression, a society of haves and have-nots that uses technology to oppress the people and is eerily similar to the world experienced by characters in The Hunger Games.

Looking for a new place to walk I remember an old neighborhood in Pensacola, Florida—my hometown.  I drove to one of our family owned markets, parked and headed on foot toward the bay side of Scenic Highway which wiggles its way along Escambia Bay to Downtown.

As soon as I was one block from the main drag I began to hear a chorus of birds and saw my first robin of the springtime.  A canopy of old oaks greeted me as I turned down the narrow streets.  It was degrees cooler and flowers and trees were in bloom in the asymmetric yards and thoroughfares.

Camellias are a signature blossom in this City of Five Flags:  they came from Asia probably on ships that brought international goods from all over the world to Pensacola’s famous deep water port.  Here is a beauty blooming in one resident’s yard:

When you walk in older neighborhoods the first thing that is noticeably different is the diversity in homes, plantings, economic strata, and biodiversity.  Far from a groomed look that we find in the modern developments in Pensacola, there is brush, tall grasses, undulating yards, and all sorts of individual touches from owners: tree swings, sculpture, bubbling ponds or water fountains, colors and textures of siding; shape and sizes of the homes and lots.

As I passed one home, up a dark trunk scampered a fat white squirrel—perhaps a protective totum for endangered neighborhoods.   Why endangered?  I happened upon an old friend, a poet, who was out canvassing the neighborhood with a clipboard and information.  A proposed change in codes would make a large stretch of land, a path to the bay and marshes,  off-limits to everyone, essentially giving one lot owner in that area private property without paying a dime.

Real neighborhoods are like climax communities in nature: they take a long time to develop into the kind of rich interrelatedness and diverse habitats that Pensacola Heights can boast.  Take a look:

To be disconnected from any actual landscape is to be, in the practical or economic sense, without a home.  To have no country carefully and practically in mind is to be without a culture.  In such a situation, culture becomes purposeless and arbitrary, dividing into popular culture,” determined by commerce, advertising, and fashion, and “high culture,” which is either social affectation , displaced cultural memory, or the merely aesthetic pursuits of artists and art lovers.  ~ Wendell Berry, Citizenship Papers, “Two Minds”

Deer Springs Inn

Up on the mountain,

Tracing the Mogollon Rim,

We hike and return by way of

The towering Outlook,

Black clouds overhead

We climb 80 feet up to

Join Ranger GS3-1in his lair.

 He scans the horizon for fire.

We chat and then leave for

Hopping-Hare cabin

 We are dreamily breathing

In the sulfur laden air of

Lightening-split sky

 Lying up in the loft,

Baptized by tumbling waters

When I was a youthful biology teacher in Buckeye, Arizona, a rural community southwest of Phoenix, a colleague privately shared information about a place he and his family vacationed – a place carefully guarded by all who frequented its cabins and woodlands.  It was Deer Springs Inn.  For forty years a retired publishing editor from Phoenix and his wife ministered to a little community of hand-built log cabins nestled in a grove of towering Ponderosa pines and to the families who frequented its beds, trails and campfires.  The first time I visited Deer Springs Inn, my daughter Heather and I drove up to meet the owners on a day trip.  What an adventure.  After climbing the Mogollon Rim from Phoenix to Payson, we traveled along a two lane highway dotted by tourist hotels and cabins, local grills and hunting and fishing outfitters.  We turned off the highway onto an unpaved forest road and drove on an undulating surface of rounded stones and rain carved gullies for 14 miles back into virgin Ponderosa Pine.  Deer Springs abuts the White Mountain Apache reservation which acts as a wildlife refuge, harboring elk from hunters.  Lou and Bea greeted us warmly and showed us around.  Each little cabin sported a jaunty name like Silver Squirrel, Hopping Hare, Bounding Bear and so forth.  There were five cabins that slept anywhere from 2 to 11 people.  Lou had installed solar panels to heat the water and barely light the cabins. Each cabin has a good supply of aromatic wood and big potbellied stove. There were no phones, TVs or other accoutrement from the so-called civilized world.  There was one Hamm radio at the main cabin.  At that time hardly anyone had a cell phone or laptop.

Heather was studying drawing at Arizona State University.  She left with dreams of drawing and painting on vacations and I with a plan to spend six weeks that following summer writing my first ever book.  I look across my dining room today and there hangs a gorgeous painting of one meadow near Deer Springs painted by Heather, reminding me of how imbued our psyches become with the places we love and cherish.

August 9, Monday 1999

Lingering-on at Deer Springs Inn…Heather off to photograph, I to write…sitting on a redwood seat by a little statue of St. Francis – lover of nature. Annie, big black lab of Ed and Mary, is barking at some distance through the woods.  Only the hum of a generator can be heard, and the mountain winds….

Places define much of what we become and in myriad ways determine the things we do.  Far from a “backdrop” to the drama of our lives, the places we inhabit, grow to love, defend fiercely as we would our children, are intimately a part of us.  We breathe their air, drink their waters, eat from the table of their mantles until they form our flesh and blood and point of view.

My family history begins in the Smoky Mountains where many Irish, Welsh, and Scottish immigrants settled.  Though I was born there at the tail end of WWII, when my father – a native of east Tennessee – returned to the States, I was whisked up into 20 crazy years of military assignments and reassignments that took my family from coast to coast in the U.S. with one gentle, magical time in Honolulu at Hickam AFB.

Changing places frequently lends to a sense of loss and confusion precisely for the reasons that place is not  a location but is the font of our biological and psychological lives.  I am only now beginning to appreciate this phenomenon, now looking back, and frankly savoring all the rich, diverse places on my “dance card” in life.

I believe that as a child I innately understood this essential relationship and became a great explorer of natural places, lithe and intentional about getting to know each new place.  From laying on my tummy watching the miniature world of grass forests to the thrill of rolling down a leaf covered hill letting the Earth pull me to her breast – I longed for that intimate attachment.

Reading books like Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is a powerful testament to the influence of land on our lives and livelihoods.  She describes like no other the long leaf pine communities that she has defended since early in her life…a community that once covered millions of acres in southeast Georgia and northern Florida and is now only little islands left to behold.

As Ray describes in poetic narrative, this community evolved with fire as its renewing element.  The canopies of long leaves are high up on the straight trunks wrapped in thick bark. The community of wiregrass below waits for fire to open its seeds and renew the land.  Among these towering pines animals and insects of unique character inhabit the land, air, water, and trees.  I recently visited the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, not too far from where Ray grew up.  When I shared this fact with friends recently, one remarked that she had no use for visiting swamps.  I thought to myself how wrong she is and how that is precisely what has destroyed so much of this land I now inhabit called Florida.

Okenfenokee lake normally receives 60 inches of rainfall each year and is the source of two rivers – the St. Mary’s which drains into the Atlantic, and the Suwannee which drains all the way to the Gulf of Mexico (280 miles).  Rangers at the refuge told me that the swamp has only received 8 inches of rain for each of the last two years and it has been on fire for one whole year.  Even as they spoke, the fire was still raging in some areas.  At the bottom of the swamp is a thick layer of peat which produces methane gas that bubbles to the top and lifts up soil and debris.  Seeds land on these natural flotillas, take root and grow.  That’s how the swamp had “grown” islands and isthmuses that provide critical habitat for birds, alligators, and fish, beavers, and deer, bobcats and before they were forced out, panthers. Because of this watery origin, the land “trembles” when you stomp your foot.  Okefenokee is the remnant of an old sea.

In my hometown of Pensacola, in northwest Florida, we are surrounded by oak and pine hammock and privileged to live by a barrier island network that stretches from Mississippi to the Great Bend of Florida.  Marshes once thickly lined these islands and dunes towered as high as thirty feet.  Development of the landscapes has radically altered these protective barriers to our natural renewing element: hurricanes.  Now when they come on shore, there is little to stop their ravaging ways.  But, forward thinkers – lovers of their home-scapes – have acted to save little slices of what once was a great Turtle Island, America.  In P-cola the main man is Jesse Earle Bowden who spearheaded the campaign to protect the islands by establishing the Gulf Islands National Seashore.

What places have formed an integral part of who you are?  How do you experience that relationship?  What are your concerns and your joys about the places where you live and breathe and go about your day?  Please let readers know so that we can share your experience here.

Another way to adapt to changing times is to – as PBS suggests – GET CREATIVE. Not only are overhead costs lower, but people don’t need to get in a car to go to lunch or dinner. They can just step off the curbside and dine!

Meals on Wheels: Food truck dining in Florida – from Florida Trend, Florida’s Source For Business News.

On this Christmas Day, about family, full of the vision of angels and infants, stars and Maggi, and the glitter of decorated trees—on this day Americans have much to consider.  The vacated halls of our national spaces—numbingly quiet after the vitriol of previous months of head-banging—lie quiet and waiting for the dawn of a new year.

It was into such spaces that Jesus was born – the infant who would become the man who overturned the tables of commerce that invaded the temples.  His rage, born of righteous indignation, was hardly a bleep on the screen of the powerful.  Had it occurred today the story would only make the local, petty-crime reports.  “Deranged Dude Goes Beserk”…the rush of money-changing undisturbed, the level of social penetration intensified and engrained in our mental frame of reference:  How much is it worth?—the National Credo.

As Jesus later reflected, new wine requires a new skin to contain it – allow for its full character to evolve, to come into its robust, unique flavor.  I’ve always enjoyed the few stories about Jesus that have survived through the ages.  As a child, I really “got” his message.  I think he would have loved and been a part of the local food movement, biking and alternative energy sector.  He would have worn American-made jeans, drunk fair-trade coffee with his friends.

Jesus would cut to the chase in America.  Per person, Americans consume more energy and goods than any other people on Earth, contributing most of the CO2 that is causing climate destabilization.  Since the poorest people are and will continue to suffer the impacts (drought, floods, disease, and starvation) Jesus would be “in our faces” about our reckless behavior.

But he would have had the same challenge as the nascent sustainability movement:  how do you get the word out to 9 billion people in time to divert a global disaster?

I am sure that Jesus would not have been politically correct nor would he engage in “people-pleasing.”

No, he would march right into the House and Senate, upturn a few tables and shout to the Heavens, “What on Earth do your think you are doing?” He would clear the air and the truth would ring across the Capitol.  For a brief moment, things would go in the right direction by just creating a pause in the fury.  Boy, do we need him now!

I wonder who will turn the tables in 2012?

At 66 years of age I am no spring chicken! But I have a father who is 94 and still going strong. Amazing man who last night, over our candle-lit, mid-week dinner conversation, exclaimed that what his generation accomplished in the 1940s was amazing.  “I wish we had a vision like that again.”

Dad is a World War II veteran, B-29 bomber pilot and retired Air Force career officer.  My sisters and I tromped around America for 20 years from military base to military base.  Circumstances led to my move to Pensacola, Florida in 2008 to live near Dad, to help when needed, and to be closer to my own son and daughter who live in the Southeast now.  Sometimes I get caught up in the cares of the day and it is not until the next morning (I am a veteran early riser) when my thoughts are clearer, that I realize the gems of wisdom that roll forth from Dad as he looks back on nearly 100 years of life!  Think of that…nearly a century of personal experience.

Two things he shared last night as we discussed current seemingly intractable problems in America:  fossil-fuel cars, and the Congressional stale-mate over, well, everything it seems.  We simply can’t agree on one important step for millions of Americans.  In the middle of that discussion he remarked that during WWII there was a national vision of where we were going and that together we would accomplish something for the whole world.  That the world of nations looked to us to make things right, to defeat a terrible wave of human to human violence.  And we did.

The second thing Dad said, almost in passing, was that “you just can’t change American’s love affair with their cars.”  He described riding in a big, comfortable Buick that same day with his medical service to his doctor.  ” I remember the model T Ford.  When everyone could afford to get one… it was our greatest joy.”  He grew up on a small farm in eastern Tennessee and recalled trips my aunts and uncles and his family made to Asheville, NC (60 miles on a narrow two-lane, through hair pin mountain roads). Imagine going from horses to a gas-powered vehicle – the transforming impact of that one invention.  The model T opened up so many possibilities and connected people, places, and thus exchange of ideas and goods and services.

This morning as I was writing in my journal, a more than 50 year habit, I realized two key things that might offer us “younger” folks some direction:  1) a national vision everyone subscribes to; 2) an invention that changes the whole paradigm of our lives.  Perhaps if we can discern what these two factors might be in 2012, we could reinvent ourselves even as my father’s generation did so many years ago.

What dream are we chasing as a nation?  What does the world look to us to do?  What could transform our daily lives and rocket us into the next new big vision for America?

[Dad described the city of Chicago’s fleet of hydrogen cars.}