Face Palm!

 Good morning.  This has been another morning for coming to sudden realizations about why I am the way I am.  (You may or may not feel that the way I am is a positive thing!)  

Yesterday I was explaining what I do to someone, and I said that being at least partially accepted by the very tight-knit closed community here has been one of the honors of my life.  There are a lot of reasons for that, and a lot of reasons why I am an unusual community member here.  First, I continue to be the only white person here, in both the staff and students populations.  Then, I am not Muslim--I am not the only non-Muslim, but I am certainly in a minority here as well.    Three years ago, when I started here it truly felt like a new world.  Currently, nine days out of ten it is a delight and honor.

So, on the way in to school this morning I was thinking about odd things in my life (many) and I started thinking about the three summers that I went to Alaska to help in the Yupik villages that have a strong Moravian church hisgtory and presence.  Please know that I am well aware that the Christian church has had a complex and often negative history in the North, as in other places where missionaries have gone. I will try to write about some of this in another post--particularly the weight of spiritual darkness that hangs over the Artic, but that is another whole set of thoughts.  

Short term mission so othen takes groups and dumps them into a place and then jerks them out with no contact ever again, which is destructive for both groups.  Because the Moravian church has a strong presence and relationships in Alaska, I was able to have the luxury (I learn after the fact) to go back to the same area for three years in a row, and the same village twice.  To put some persepctive on this, the coastal villages I went to are twenty or so miles from the Bering Sea, and the only way in is on a plane.  Most of these villages are in danger of having to relocate because of global warming.

Mission Lake, Bethel

                                                                    


                Janice and I                                       Church Bell, Kipnuk                        Kids, Kipnuk

                                            Houses up on piles because of freeze and thaw

                                                                                        Nowhere but Alaska!

It is a devestatingly isolated landscape and world, but it is also one of the most beautiful places I have seen--as long as being wet all the time and smelling like mud and fish are ok with you.  There is nothing over knee  height growing and really no colors but brown, green, and white.

It is one of the joys of my heart that I was able to get off an eight-seater plane in the far North and have people say "Welcome Back" and know my name.  These are worn people who speak slowly with lots of pauses.  We from the lower 48 ush through all conversations we have.  Indigenous Alaskamakes us slow down and think.  

                                                            Low tide in Kipnuk

                                                            See Kipnuk in lower left

Just getting to be in that place was enough for me--to walk and watch and be invited to people's homes to eat and to have the kids yell to us and then not want to go home and follow us back to our little house.  Even boiling all water and having no plumbing was ok.  I had the time of my life.

Sometimes you don't realize quite how unusual a time you are really having when you go out like this.  On another day I will tell the story of the Throwing Party and how I suddenly learned that NO ONE from outside sees and participates in that.  

So, what I love is the places in between--the communities on the edge (like my immigrant kids and their families) and the people who exist apart (although with bigger tv sets and satellite dishes than I will ever have or want.)  I am fascinated by this often cruel, forever beautiful world we live in.

This Virus May Hurt Us More Than COVID

Usually the beginning of school brings some happy exhaustion with it and an overall sense of things being right with our little part of the world.  This year I am increasingly feeling that we are wandering in a thick fog and can't see the way ahead.  It seems to me that every decision we make about the virus is wrong in some way.    I fear that we will be in our current fog and isolation for quite awhile.

Perhaps this state of affairs is coloring the way I am reading--or perhaps it has suddenly given me clarity of something.  I am doing a read-along of I Think You're Wrong (But I'm Listening), by Beth A. Silvers and Sarah Stewart Holland.  I'm not too far in to it, but a quote from the Introduction has stayed with me all week: 

 "We are choosing division.  We are choosing conflict.  We are choosing to turn our civic sphere into a circus.  We are choosing all of this, and we can choose otherwise."  

In the same way COVID is a virus that seems to morph so that every symptom becomes part of it and it is constantly changing, seemingly just ahead of anything we can do, we seem to have become infected with a zealous social virus that is becoming stronger every day.  I have said for a long time that we will need to be patient and wait for things in the big political world to re-set themselves because politics is a cycle, but I now believe that we have allowed ourselves to catch a virus of rage and despair, and division, and we have chosen to use the current medical model as our paradigm for this as well.

We have chosen to quarantine ourselves with those we feel--rightly or wrongly--agree with us, and, at a faster and faster rate, if my social media accounts are anything like the rest of yours, we are culling those who are not like us from our herd.  

To quarantine ourselves in this case means that we are choosing not to change.  The quarantine model keeps us frozen, unable to be creative or to connect with others outside our tiny sphere.  This ensures that change will not happen.  Let me say that again--This ensures that change will not happen.

This is a summer where many people feel that enough is enough and we need to change our country.  My fear is that our social virus is working hard to maintain the status quo.  I would go so far at to say that this virus underlies all of the systemic horrors of our world.  We have chosen to ignore that there is a threat or quarantine, not to put a mask on and go out safely.  We aresaying  no to any vaccine suggested to us.  

This may seem very simplistic, but it has been something of a revelation to me this morning.  We must change our paraidgms or  we will be hurt by our social virus more than by COVID.  We are at the tipping point.  

" osing wedivision. We are choosing conflict. We are choosing to turn our civic sphere into a circus. We are choosing all of this , and we can choose otherwise."

The Books of August

 The Books of August

For the first time in the season of the virus I have slowed down a bit with reading.  I did a re-read of a book I love, found a new author, and continued my diversity reading.  All great books--just not a lot of them.

My re-read was Driftless, by David Rhodes, which I loved ten years ago and reead again to see if it was as good as I remembered.  It is actually better this time around--a true Wisconsin rural book with quirky interesting characters, some parts that make me cry, some that made me laugh out loud even when I was re-reading, and truly wonderful male characters.  Rhodes' men are three-dimensional, make mistakes, but we always learn why, and they grow so much.  I haven't read a book that empathizes with its male characters so much in a long time.  David Rhodes has written a sequal, Jewelweed, which I have not read yet.  

For a long time I kept lists of books that were set in or had characters from the places I have lived.  I will digress for a minute and say that the other book that is quintessentially Wisconsin for me is Midnight Champagne, by A. Manette Ansay.  She writes a lot, and Oprah has picked up some of her books in the past.  They are excellent but tend to be rather dark.  This is, for lack of a better term, a ghost story set during a wedding at a venue that used to be a strip club or brothel along the stretch of I-94 between Kenosha and Chicago.  For those of you who have not visited this territory, it is a no-man's land of cheese, fire works, tatoos, truck stops, etc. This slim, simple story grabs you by the throat. The rather unexpected wedding of people who have known each other four months takes place at the same time that a ghostly woman, somewhat accidentally killed by her abusive husband in another part of the lodge, roams as a ghost, trying to figure out what has happened.  So, wedding, ghost, and murder--a fascinating mix on a snowy night.  The characters could be from nowhere but Wisconsin.

This month I discovered M. K. Jemison.  I read The City We Became, which needs to be put on the New York list mentioned above.  Jemison says it is her first book set in the real world, and she said it was so much harder to work with reality than to create a new world.  This book is a fantasy love letter to NYC.  I can't recommend it enough.  

I just finished Jemison's The Fifth Season,  This world is incredibly grim, but Jemison's strength is that she makes you believe in the otherness of it from the start.  It is the first of the Broken Earth Trilogy--she seems to write trilogies regularly, and The City We Became is also going to be a trilogy.  If you are just finding her, as I did, I would read The City first and then branch out to the other worlds.  

Finally, for my fiction reading this month, I finished Long Bright River, which I started in the spring when Lucy and I were walking a lot, and I finished it now that I have time in the car again.  I have heard a few people comment that this is a book without a lot of diversity.  I think this might be being a bit unfair, since it is a book that is VERY grounded in a particular place and community, and that is part of its message.  I think I have come to this book a bit late--like I am late to N.K. Jemison, so I won't go in to a lot of plot summary here. There are so many social issues included in this book, but what struck me the most was that the narrator has all the best intentions but ends up being so wrong about so many things and having to suffer guilt for those things as well as all the other burdens she carries.  She isn't exactly an unreliable narrator, but she has based her life on some beliefs and doesn't seem able to move beyond.  There is a hint of a happy ending, but so much has been lost here.

I read one book for my ongoing re-education on race matters.  This month it was White Negroes:  When Cornrows Were in Vogue and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation. by Lauren Michelle Jackson, who is a wonderful cultural critic.  If you have puzzled with how to think about the Kardashians, Paula Dean, and Christina Aguilera through a racial lens, here is your chance to have a clear, cogent analysis of how they fit into the bigger framework of race in America.