Archive for October, 2009
What Holds Water?
We live in a noisy world.
We have coming at us in any given moment: Telephones that no longer sit quietly next to our bed or on our office desks (Now they follow our every step into movie theaters, church, and romantic dinners with our lover); Mail that no longer comes once a day on the eagerly awaited footsteps of our postman (Now it beeps its electronic announcement night, day, and every moment between); News that no longer slaps at our doorstep at dawn, or arrives from Walter Cronkite’s lips at dusk (Now it comes at us 24/7, from so many contrary and irritating voices that it’s hard to know whom to trust).
Yes, we can turn off the cell phone, the computer, and cable TV. But they remain a demanding, addictive call to arms. We are sorely afraid that we will miss something.
There was a time when we missed nearly everything, and never felt the loss. Never gave it a thought: So fully preoccupied were we with our immediate human relationships and the unavoidable life in our faces.
I can almost hear my twenty-nine year old son laughing his head off at these thoughts, some 6,000 miles away. He is mocking my words–calling them nostalgia, accusing me of being an old geezer.
But permit me to clarify (for son Sam, and for the rest): Mine is neither a judgment nor indictment of the abundant gifts of technology, the miracle of instant communication, the demanding world we’ve created. That is not my intent at all.
Rather, it is this. How can we discern? How do we decide, among the Google of accessible information: What holds water?
Twelve years ago, the Hawaiian Grandmothers told ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani: “When you’ve heard all the lies, you will know the truth.” Daily, in these twelve years he has been strenuously tested.
So much knowledge; so little wisdom. In every niche of the Internet, we find voices of ignorance that will affirm our own. There is no longer a need to be alone in our nightmares, fantasies, conspiracies, or falsehood. Everywhere there is a chat room or a website to keep us from feeling the occasional, well-deserved loneliness.
In the early days of cell phones, when it still felt outrageously intrusive to have the person standing in front of you at Starbucks answering classified ads, or in the toilet stall next to yours arguing with a boyfriend–there was still the remaining hope of an agreed upon civility.
‘Iokepa used to laugh and say of that ubiquitous cell phone usage: “Yes, we know you are not alone. We know you have someone who will actually speak with you.” And it did, at times, sound like the point of it all.
So there is Rachel Maddow and there is Bill O’Reilly. There is Wikipedia and there is Amazon. Newspapers disappear but there is no escaping Google. Publishers and bookstores fold; Netflix flourishes. Choose your weapon.
We fill ourselves with endless trivia. We have no protective sensory screen. Infomercials pours into our ears and eyes, and then undigested, out of our mouths. It is a terrifying national version of the childhood game of Telephone: So many distortions in the repetition.
We repeat what we hear. But have no ability to explain what we repeated. We are marionettes, and someone–many many someones–are pulling the strings. We pass as literate when we are puppets. We spout opinions that won’t hold up to challenge. We heard it, we read it, it sounded true. The plethora of source smothers any likelihood of independent observation or idea. How do we know, What holds water?
Without exception, my authentic thoughts and feelings (mine, not Keith Olbermann’s) emerge from complete silence: In my walks along a beach, down a country lane, or in an urban forest–those places where my gut drowns out the stuff my mouth spouts reflexively. My answers matter, it seems, only if they’ve traveled the full length of my looping intestine.
Yet I realize that even a walk in the park demands a certain confidence–and its corollary courage. We must fully believe that we are capable of independent thought–and then we must exorcise the noise that passes for consensus and conventional wisdom, in favor of our quiet knowing. ‘Iokepa says: “We owe it to our soul.”
If it holds up alone on top of the mountain, it will, very likely, hold water.
GRANDMOTHERS WHISPER–A Publisher Now!
I’ve been a writer my entire life, a professional writer since I left college at twenty-two, and an author since I was forty. In that time, I have naturally watched my writing evolve.
From eighteen years of salaried newspaper and magazine journalism to the less financially predictable, but ultimately more emotionally satisfying occupation of writing books.
Sometimes those books have been well-published, turned into feature films, sold around the globe in translation; sometimes not. Writing for myself on occasion meant writing only for myself. But that was the nature of the beast.
I took the gamble when I traded writing on a weekly paycheck, for the greater freedom of writing longer, more creatively, and with greater authenticity.
In those many years, I wrote daily: From the moment my sons climbed onto their school bus at 7:30 in the morning, to the moment they disembarked at 3:30 in the afternoon. I was a single mom. I wrote to support my family and I turned out a book-length manuscript approximately every two years. The discipline was no different than when I wrote for an employer–the office space, however, was home. In the evenings and on the weekends, I taught a writers’ workshop.
Then, twelve years ago, I met ‘Iokepa, and six months later, we joined lives.
So many things changed with that meeting; it becomes impossible to single out a preeminent one. But for the purpose of this story: One of the most earth-shaking changes was around my identity and occupation as a writer. Those tremors still quake under my feet. Those who knew me well know the truth of this.
I never stopped writing in those twelve years. But I no longer called myself a “Writer.”
I never stopped writing, but my tools shifted: My computer gave way to a yellow legal pad and pen. I never stopped writing, but I no longer sat at a roll-top desk in a silent office; I wrote now in public on a folding beach chair next to a tent. I never stopped writing, but I had no end product in mind; all those words on all those legal pads for all those years, for what purpose?
I wrote, as I used to tell my workshop students, “To understand my world and the world around me.” Perhaps, it was (freed from any career aspiration) the purest writing of my life. But it was not literature.
And yet, literature has happened from that, “Purest writing of my life.” There were weeks, and occasionally months, when I was unexpectedly gifted access to one or another lovely, silent house, and to the familiar technology of our computer age.
My mounting stack of legal pads: Those scraps of feeling, snatches of insight, and moments of wisdom solidified–jelled–into a form. First the concept, then later, the reality: Revision after revision, stolen moment after stolen moment, year after year, this singular writing of my life began to look like a book–and then, like the most mature, important and serious book of my life.
Out of these twelve years–during which time I have been hungry, exhausted and at times faithless, yet always writing–I have given birth. Grandmothers Whisper is that newborn.
All that ‘Iokepa Hanalei ‘Imaikalani and I have lived in these years; much of what the Native Hawaiian people have lived in the last two hundred; and all of what the Hawaiian ancestors have shared is part of this story. It is cultural. It is spiritual. It is a deeply personal account of one Jewish woman’s rite of passage into a stranger’s aboriginal culture. It is, of course, a love story.
A powerful New York literary agent has seized the Grandmothers Whisper manuscript with enthusiasm. He is circulating it to publishers as I write. I ask that you–our Return Voyage friends and supporters–offer up a prayer, the power of your good wishes.
Please ask that Grandmothers Whisper finds its launching pad, its publishing home, and its way into your hands, imminently. The Grandmothers say: The time is now.
“Organized Religion.”
We have just finished observing the Jewish New Year–those contemplative days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur–the holiest on the Hebrew calendar. ‘Iokepa, as always, joined me in celebrating with the Kaua’i Jewish Community.
My thoughts go back a month, to a night in Oregon.
We had been invited to a Friday evening, Shabbat dinner at the loving home of a Portland Jewish family.
We lit the candles and said the familiar and traditional blessing in Hebrew. This accomplished professional woman, who is the mother of three, held her hands over the heads of her teenage sons, and prayed that they grow to be men in the manner of their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Together we offered gratitude for the loaf of hand-twisted, ritual challah before we ate. In all ways it was the Sabbath of my childhood, and ‘Iokepa and I were grateful for the invitation, the company, and the home-cooked meal.
Somewhere in the middle of the Sabbath meal on that spotless white tablecloth this sweet-natured father, who owns a micro-brewery and is a trained chef, confessed: “I don’t believe in organized religion.”
These are words that ‘Iokepa and I have heard with remarkable frequency.
They come, across-the-board, from men and women reared within Roman Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Islam and Jewish traditions. Typically, these words are a plea for understanding, a means of demarcation, a way to distinguish between the “Organized religion” in which they’d been reared, and the “Spirituality” that now nurtures them.
These are not people without belief in the unseen; they are not atheists.
They want ‘Iokepa, and they want me too, to know (with our two viable, culturally-based “Religions”) that they are not us. Here’s what, I think, that they are saying.
They are distancing themselves–not so much from from the religion of their birth as–from the shortfall of their religious traditions to practice that which they preach. From the lapses.
It isn’t the “Organized Religion” they are rejecting (though those are certainly the words they use) , it is the failure of its adherents to adhere to the fundamental teachings of those religions. It is the compromises of the practitioners that insult, embarrass, and ultimately shame our friends. In sum, it is the hypocrisy.
So, to my ears, “I don’t believe in organized religion” means: I am sickened by trips to the Torah that are bought by the biggest financial donors to the synagogue; I am horrified by the church covering up child molestation; I reject ministers who live like sultans; I refuse the distortions of Jesus’ and Mohamed’s words to justify war.
Theirs is an absolutely credible reaction to the false prophets, to the racists who call themselves Christians, to the crooks who secure aliyahs. Where there has been falsehood, hypocrisy and outright blasphemy–it has, at times, been difficult to remember the truth.
And yet ‘Iokepa’s ancestors remind us, “You haven’t gone back far enough.” Our ancestors, the indigenous peoples from around the world had to embrace community responsibility and compassion to survive.
The problem is not with the organization of religion–or its authentic origins and teachings. The problem is with the human shortfall. The problem is us–humans who attempt, and fail, to practice what the originators perfected.
To my eyes, that makes it all the more imperative for us, who’ve been reared within powerful religious traditions, to seize the reins. It’s up to us to steer our congregations, our communities, by our example.
Culturally, we don’t condone abandoning a difficult child. We don’t believe it wise to run away from our aging parents. Turning our back has seldom healed a wound.
Our lives–the way we live them, far more than the words we speak–are the light for others. The very example of how we place our feet along our singular path is what inspires. We are the beacons for change, the lantern in the dark, the way to the fulfillment of the ideas and the ideals of our traditions and our ancestors.
We are the realization of our “Organized Religions” highest aspirations. It is truly selfish to leave the rest of our family alone in their struggle.
Amen.