COFFEE MUGS

In the Eighties when I was in the ministry, I was serving mostly fellowships who had no building, so committee meetings and so on had to be in someone's home -- like -- mine. Of course we had to have coffee, so I set out to collect blue and white coffee mugs, all different, so that people could tell which one was theirs when it was time for a refill. We thought it was ecologically unsound (and not very elegant) to use paper or styrofoam. To show how long ago this was, I bought the plates to be ash trays. There are a couple of ringers here. I had thirty or more blue and white mugs for a long time, but many of them have escaped by now.

My most recent acquisition really pleases me. I've been looking for a coffee mug that was insulated and this one is, plus it has a lid with a rubber gasket, it's steel so it won't chip, and it has a big rubberized handle plus a rubberized ring on the bottom for soft landings. The lip is nicely shaped to fit my lips and somehow cool so I don't burn my mouth. I like coffee that's really HOT, though I'll drink it cold. The manufacturer is Trudeau in Canada and I like both of those, too. (Pierre Trudeau tops any Kennedy in my opinion.)

For a while in the ministry I was going from one place to another: Clinical Pastoral Care for a summer, church internship for a year, conferences, workshops, training sessions for a week. I developed the habit of buying a new bar of soap (the first time because I forgot to pack one and the place we stayed didn't supply any) in each new town. If I had a lot of money, I'd get expensive name-brand soap at the perfume counter. If I was broke it was an off-brand at a 7-11. The most fun was local artisan soap like pine-scented with pine needles ground up in it. And alongside the soap, I'd buy a mug. Until I came to this mug by Laurel. For a long time -- until I got back here in Montana -- I wouldn't drink my coffee at home from any other mug because I loved this one so much. I don't suppose they're Blackfeet faces exactly, but they could be.

Now I hide this mug because if I have company this is the mug they head straight for and they use it before I can make sure they know it can't go in the microwave because of the gold on it.

Instead of my fancy mug, I got in the habit of using these big tin mugs in the summer for cold drinks. They're wearing out a little now and aren't very good for hot coffee. I have to tip in a little skim milk. They lose heat quickly.

At one point when I was feeling domestic and as though I ought to be more prepared for company, so I bought a set of china -- with Rupert Brooke's blue rings around it -- from Crate & Barrel. These cups have proper saucers -- four place settings. Never used. Well, maybe once.

My mother gave me this orange set which is like soap bubbles. Even my company asks for something else because they are so afraid of breaking them. Anyway, properly they should be used for tea, not coffee. I just enjoy looking at them.

I was telling all this to my biggest fan (literally) so he sent me a photo of HIS fav coffee mug. It holds an entire pot of coffee. I tell him it's not a mug, it's a tankard! He pulls into the McDonald's or whatever, asks them to fill it up but NOT to wash it because it has a "patina" he doesn't want to lose. He likes the taste. He says this monster will stay warm for a half day.

I figure if his hands get cold, he can put them in the coffee.

But it would be much more elegant to simply wrap hands around the mug, like this excellent and creative mug. It belongs to the librarian. You can see her in the previous post. Instead of a handle it has a sort of sleeve to tuck fingertips into.

As far as I know, Kathy is not a Unitarian, so I don't know what she would make of one of our fav mock-hymns sung to the tune of "Holy, Holy, Holy." It's from Chris Raible's "Hymns for the Cerebration of Strife." (The standard hymnal of the time was "Hymns for the Celebration of Life.") It goes, "Coffee, coffee, coffee! Early in the morning! Strong and hot and black as sin . . ." I don't remember the rest. Couldn't find it on the Internet.

THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF CHILDREN by Robert Coles

Robert Coles was practically a family industry for decades, examining and reflecting on the lives and thoughts of children or people in poverty, and reporting on them in what was taken to be their own words, or at least their own thoughts as edited and reorganized. This was just before the Great Deconstruction -- a period when investigators could still feel romantically virtuous about such research in spite of a little niggling doubt here or there. At least he wondered what the kids thought, though he tended to be what I would call patronizing sometimes.

In the first chapter Coles considers Freud’s antipathy to religion, then talks about the “object relations” “teddy bear” psychologists like Winnicott. The meat of the chapter starts on page ten where we meet Connie whom all the adults are finding balky and arrogant. When Coles begins to pay attention to her, it turns out that she has some very definite ideas about what is “religious,” meaning institutional and dictated, and what is “spiritual” meaning a kind of inner inspiration. She wants to weigh what she does in these terms and choose how to proceed. They aren’t giving her enough time, space or respect. She was a little ahead of the cutting edge of the questioning and demanding individual choice we know now.

Coles says he’s different from the other clinical psychologists because he goes into the field (he is a “field worker” like Dorothy Day, and, yes, he did work with her), he simply asks kids what they think, he is working with kids of many countries and many class levels including the VERY poor, and he is including his own family who have the ability to “set him straight” if he goes off the tracks. They are of a privileged and educated class, who feel their obligation to others.

What I see when reading this book is that he’s still very much into the humanities assumptions of the Fifties and Sixties when he trained, which is to say he’s an authority figure (often refers to himself as “doctor” -- he’s a psychiatrist), he doesn’t mind mentioning his friendships with major figures (Anna Freud and William Carlos Williams), he thinks that “spirituality” is a kind of elementary theology -- only reaches what I consider “spiritual” when he gets to the Hopi. Until then he’s tied to institutions. The kids constantly repeat what their parents, teachers, priests have told them and, in fact, Coles found the kids through those people. The kids are addressing the world on the terms of adults, but doing some excellent footwork in accommodating it. He does see that. The issues they address are the classics: why doesn’t God intervene in tragedies, where is the justice when it comes to heaven and hell, how to reconcile God with Jesus, why is there suffering?

The Hopi girl needs to be explained to Coles by another Hopi, because the kids shut down when they come to school where he contacts them. They feel that they are obligated to do this, because it is a public place. They are not hiding but exercising decorum and appropriateness. When he goes to the girl’s house and sits on her front stoop with her and her dog, gazing at the thousand-mile landscape, things are different. In fact, often reversed. The ten-year-old girl tells him “The sky watches us and listens to us. It talks to us and it hopes we are ready to talk back. The sky is where the God of the Anglos lives, a teacher told us. She asked where our God lives. I said, ‘I don’t know.’ I was telling the truth. Our God is the sky and lives wherever the sky is. Our God is the sun and moon, too, and our God is our [the Hopi] people.”

It is not possible to not have a culture. It is simply the accumulation of what one knows about how things fit together. We speak of the cultures of animals and that is truthful. Pre-adolescents, which are the age group Coles is talking to, are just figuring out how to accept what has been presented to them. They can get very impatient, angry, and irritated about it all and then the adults want “therapy” for them.

Coles never interviews a truly enraged child, I thought. But then I remembered the girl in a Rio de Janeiro favela, who was particularly indignant about her priest courting the rich. The towering status of Jesus (No one in this book ever says “Christ.”) seemed a particular provocation. “I wonder what He is thinking. He can see all of us and he must have an opinion. I try to talk with Him when I am most upset. He is all I have.” Coles was concerned about the girl’s mental health and consulted a colleague in Rio who filled him in on how tough the girl’s life was. The girl demands, “Why does the fat priest sit down there with rich people eating too much for his own health while my little sister cries from hunger.” The father was long gone. The mother was dying of TB. To Coles’ credit, he got the mother to a doctor but it was too late. Margarita demands, “Why doesn’t God knock down that statue? Why does he keep Jesus locked up in it?”

Coles is aware that he ought to be listening and trying to get under the layer of bullshit pre-determined stuff, so he does that by presenting a lot of art supplies and asking the kids if they would like to draw. He doesn’t tell them WHAT. Naturally enough, since they are theist (except the Hopi) they go straight anthropomorphic and draw God’s face, though the Islamic kids cannot and do avoid it. One of the most moving accounts is of a boy who draws a big circle for God’s face, a smaller circle for Jesus’ face, and then puts a rainbow canopy over them, which he suggests might be the Holy Spirit. Coles describes all this gravely and elegantly. He presents the sense of the kids but I don’t think he’s using their rhetoric. Some of the drawings are in the book and are pretty interesting.

He does not press the thing about God being a version of one’s real life father for which some readers will be grateful. Nor does he address the issue of a bad father or a missing father. All parents are movie-ready wise but a few priests come in for hard knocks by outraged kids like Margarita.

One chapter each is supplied for Islamic Pakistani kids, Jewish kids, and secular kids. Time has affected their impact greatly, particularly the one about the Pakistani boy living in England. His account of what it would be like to be a pilot -- all about control, power, correctness, punishment, obedience to authority, and the enveloping dreamtime of night -- can’t be anything but terrifying after 9/11.

To end this book -- which was pretty confrontive for its times, Coles goes back to Dorothy Day. He calls the children pilgrims -- actually that was his wife’s idea, but it fits with Day’s outlook. He says, “These children don’t need sanctification, but they deserve an accounting.” The NYTimes yesterday carried a story about the bulldozing of the favelas where Rio is clearing land for a new Olympic stadium. No one made a list of the people living there, much less how many children there were.

LOCAL vs. UNIVERSAL

Kathy is prettier than this in person.

This morning the librarian had arranged a little rendezvous between myself and a man here in Valier who writes with the help of the librarian. If you say these things are beyond what librarians do, you’d be right and wrong. Like everything else, librarians are on a spectrum from hopeless to brilliant. Kathy is towards the top end, not because of fancy degrees, but because she’s a community builder. She values people as much as books and she doesn’t limit books to those funny square-cornered things with pages. Computers don’t intimidate her and she has an eye for art.

Byron’s blog is at www.mythicalhunter.blogspot.com He’s a man who has done a lot of things and is now retired in Valier. I would like to see Valier attract more writers and artists to the low-cost houses (some not even upscale enough for today’s renters) and low key life. Anyway, he wanted to know about self-publishing so I threw into a sack a bunch of demonstration books, ranging from Bob Scriver’s high-production “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains” to Adolf Hungry Wolf’s early homemade stapled books to Gwen Frostic’s books so homemade that she even made the paper and bound the books: they are art objects.

It turns out that Byron simply wants to put some of his blog material on paper, so he will probably just take a copy-ready manuscript to Kinko and get them to make him a few hundred copies to sell around the region. He’s a hunter/fisherman and likes to write small smile-generating “funny moments.” We have a number of bloggers and column writers (they combine the two) in the local papers who do just that. A few have progressed to bound books and speaking here and there. None of the locals that I know of have gone “audible” which I think has a lot of potential where people drive long distances and work with the radio running in the background. A lady ranger from Glacier Park came along and fell into the conversation as did Corky, a former student of mine with near-family connections to Bob and I who runs the motel. It was a lively time.

I value these friends and enjoy them and their books and lives. But I will not give them much time. I will not go out of my way to do much more for them than this sort of conversation: that is, no editing, rewriting, typing, etc. Other people in town are capable of that. These friends are not occupying the mental territory where I live now.

The question arises of why I write and what I expect to get out of it. I do not make money -- in fact, I go in the hole. I’m subsidized by Social Security and my own willingness to live on less. But this is always what I’ve done. I move back and forth among the poverty of art and the poverty of the ministry and the poverty of underemployment. It’s only money. I have a certain kind of education and a big pile of books, which the librarian augments with Interlibrary Loan. Maybe ten years are left for me to live, if I’m lucky, and I intend to use them. What I can do seems to respond to a need I hear.

This is a time of confusion, not just politically and emotionally, but in terms of what we should believe, what gives the world meaning. People -- whole nations -- are lying, cheating, murdering and stealing. Is it because God is dead? If God is dead, what hope is there? Everyone gets stuck on this humanoid in the sky. I have no idea whether my ideas are the Ultimate Truth because I have no idea what Ultimate Truth really is. It may be deader than God. But I’m following up a few clues.

Genre publishing has left paper and gone to ebooks because it works. The readers gobble print, want to forget everything else, and don’t have money and space for physical books. Some travel. I think it’s really GREAT that textbooks have gone to tablets -- an American tradition, isn’t it? The student slate tablet with chalk? LIke the one Anne Shirley broke over Gilbert’s head when he mocked her red hair? Ebooks have also blown open the door to mixed media: print with a sound track, print that interleaves with video, print that’s watching your eyes and turning the page at the right time. It’s all great. (And totally dependent on the level of technology we can sustain in a fat country. I don’t mean the latest Kindle, I mean electricity.)

I was surprised to read that one expanding category of paper print is “spiritual” writing. I’ve scoffed at it -- I suppose I thought of it as a place for genre God-haters and dizzy pseudo-Hindu sutra chasers. People who can’t be troubled to come in and sit down in either a church or a library. They’d rather smother in a charlatan’s ersatz sweat lodge under a plastic Walmart tarp.

But now I think that there are readers and writers out there who are more dignified and worthy, seeking something like the revelations we cherished in the Sixties. All those backpack books. “Be Here Now.” Some are taking a second look at those books (it’s easier now that obscenity has been pushed back), making serious explorations of what we know so far and where we might look next. Not all the print is in books: blogs, websites, private communications, think-tanks (Edge.com, TED, MIT lectures on tape). Not all the conversation is in English. (Uh, oh.) What we’re looking for is a simple, powerful, gripping idea we can use as a guide. I think we’re getting closer but we’re not there yet.

No one has helped me more in my own quest than Tim and the boys of Cinematheque. They constantly throw atrocity, agony, destruction, and death in my face -- hardballs. My catcher’s mitt is not enough: my hand stings. I nearly lose an eye. I’m knocked cold. But I stay in the game because it forces me to grow in skill and power. I am not writing to make people laugh (though that happens) or to make money. (Hahahahahaha.) It’s a ministry. I’m not necessarily the minister. God is dead -- there is no God and never was. So now what do we tell the “twelves”?

I agree with the conclusions of these handsome, wicked, feral guys: Art is God. Art is participation in the universe. (You think God is love? Prove it. Show me your life.) The most subversive action is becoming part of the action without any permission or filter. Just there, because the presence of opposition is a key to the universe that pitches at these guys fatal spitballs aimed at their temples, even as the boys dance in the face of death.

MARTIN MURIE, HERO

"A slight sag in the top wire.

Someone has stepped over, or was it just a range cow scratching its hide?

Great swatches of dark and of light, familiar and yet not quite,

and the lights and darks shift as if nothing is totalized, nothing locked in.

The winds, they touch your face differently,

they leave a tangy taste."

from the poem " Fences" by Martin Murie.


It was quiet from Yellow Springs and now I know why. Martin Murie has passed on to a heaven that surely must have packrats in it. “Packrat” was sort of his Internet avatar except that he operated mostly by snail mail. http://www.packratnest.com/ His strength was not innovation and splash, but rather a steady reminding presence: tenacious, relentless. Long before eBooks, Martin was self-publishing books he got printed locally and personally distributed through the upper New York area and on the web. Not just to bookstores, but to bait shops, service stations, antique stores, and whatever unlikely places he could find where people might pick up a book. They were engaging tales of guys working together to do good.

Because I wrote reviews of each of them, he sent me free copies. I expect that some day they will be invaluable in terms of dollars, quite aside from their invaluable content. For one thing Martin is connected to the history of environmentalism through his parents. See http://www.madeinwyoming.net/profiles/Murie.php and http://www.muriecenter.org/ The elder Muries were founders of modern conservation and environmentalist thought and organizations (The Wilderness Society), sometimes enduring harsh opinions when they were ahead of their times, as when they advocated for wolves.

It’s not easy to be the son of such people. I encourage readers to research the elder Muries separately but in addition to Martin, who made his own way. Martin’s earliest summer years were passed in the bottom of a drift boat so far to the north that his mother had to drape the boat with netting to keep the mosquitoes from carrying him off. His father was combing the watery country around them, making early waterfowl counts. Mardi’s account is in "Two in the Far North." (53 used copies for sale beginning at $2.37 on Amazon.) Some of Martin’s books are there as well, though you can probably still buy them through his website.

I didn’t know the following until I read the story in the Yellow Springs, Ohio, newspaper. This town is rather like Concord, a haven for artists, thinkers, and crafts people like Alison, who is a weaver. It is what Deleuzeguattari would call a rhizome.

Village veterans remember wars

By Megan Bachman Published: November 11, 2010

Former Antioch professor Martin Murie lives daily with the reminder of his service in World War II, having lost his right eye in the mountains of Italy. Like many veterans, he finds his memories difficult to live with. “I keep meeting veterans and we don’t talk much about the war — it’s just too painful,” he said. After stays in various hospitals after the war, Murie had to hitchhike and hop freight trains to get back home to Wyoming, where he gave the Purple Heart he was awarded for his injury to his mother. He also received a silver star for killing an enemy machine gunner, who was firing at his comrades, with one shot from his M1 rifle. Murie studied philosophy and literature at Antioch on the GI bill and later became a professor. Now he’s an anti-war protester and member of Veterans for Peace. “For the rest of my life — I can’t forget it, and that’s why I go to Yellow Springs every Saturday and I really am a vehement anti-war veteran,” said Murie, who commutes from Xenia to attend a weekly peace protest in Yellow Springs. “War is not the answer, we just can’t go on with it.”

Until aging forced a return to the Yellow Springs community, Martin and Alison lived in near-wilderness, as has been the custom of the family. Every weekend, too hot or too cold or pleasant, they demonstrated for peace, standing on street corners with signs. Sentries for peace. And over the years they formed a community of like-minded, tough-minded people, who had decided to draw the line.

What I learned from Martin and am only realizing now is that bearing witness is one justification for self-publishing. The academic world can be as stifling as the commercial world, but personally making books, writing columns, maintaining websites, telling stories can feed the enormous spiritual hunger that seems to be driving many people in a time when no religious institution is prepared to make the changes necessary to get the message out. Let alone figuring out what the message IS.

Martin had no doubt about the message. It is that the natural world is us and we are it. All our understanding and all our passion comes from being out on the land, afoot, storing up what we can. Loren Eiseley (Martin often reminded me of him) once wrote a little fantasy about breaking open a packrat’s nest and falling back to make room for all the cultural artifacts that fall out. Instead of spoons and combs, out fell concertos and fine paintings. You can imagine your own list of what you’d put in your packrat nest. That’s part of what writers do.

I met Martin on the listserv called “Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment,” asle@interversity.org ,one of the earlier and most persisting of the environmental lists. In fact, so long that since the Nineties it has been possible to see a generation turn over. The WWII people have nearly all left us now. The WWI people who were so germinal are gone. The Civil War people exist only in books. Out of their trauma came determination to make the world a better place, to become living examples of the Bioneer principles: everything is connected, everything is living, everything is changing.

We so hate it when that change means a loss, which it often does. But war teaches about death and as Raven, Martin’s daughter, emailed me, “ A massive tree is down. The forest floor is lit with a new light, and we are trying to adjust to it.” A person is just one element in an ecology. Martin is not gone but only transformed. And he transformed some of the rest of us. That’s how an ecology works.

GOING UP?

Back in the day, when a Meadville/Lombard student enrolled simultaneously at the University of Chicago and earned an MA from the latter within the MDiv from the former, which meant that the student had to pass a test on reading French, I signed up for the seminary cluster’s course with a special tutor meant to get us prepped and passing. It was taught by a French African man preparing for the priesthood. He looked like a gorilla. Really.

He had a strong French accent, which I thought was probably an advantage, but the other students -- high grade white boys shooting for the Ph.D. and with no interest in the ministry -- were absolutely turned off and complained that he was unintelligible. They were powerful enough that the priest lost his job. I’m sure he needed it. When he told us he had been replaced, he turned in the doorway, looked around the room and said softly, “Bon chance.” I’m sure he meant it ironically.

You may remember that I’m watching “Homicide” from end-to-end and that before that I watched “The Wire” from end-to-end. By the time I’d run out of episodes of “The Wire,” the black people (who greatly outnumbered the white characters) were the ones who looked normal and the whites looked geeky. It was a little like being on the train to Minneapolis after teaching on the rez for a few years. The blonde kids running up and down the aisles looked to me as though they’d been living in the dark for the past year. I told this story to Darrell Kipp and he asked me, “How would you feel if you moved to Scotland and everyone there looked just like you?” But how do I know? I never look at myself. When I see my reflection in a shop window, I never recognize me. I think I look the way I looked in 1966.

One of the “Homicide” episodes had a story about Yaphet Kotto, who took a romantic interest in a woman who was a light-colored black with nearly Caucasian features. He asked her out, but she would have nothing to do with him. He has a wide nose, fat lips, hair like a carpet. He was frank about it, talked about how he was constantly being shut out because, as one witness put it, “You have a REEEEALLY scary face!” Yet the man himself is elegantly built, speaks like a Shakespearean actor, and on the show purports to be culturally Italian. He plays with the whole thing, but it’s a sorrow to him in character and out. Yet the truth is that the more you look at him, the more he begins to look normal, attractive, appealing, familiar. (Familia!) It’s just that if you don’t live where there are many blacks, you’ll never have a chance for their faces to register in your brain.

A friend of mine tells about being at the United Nations to testify. The elevator opens. It’s occupied by very tall, very black Africans who might not like what he has to say. But he doesn’t pretend he forgot something and back off. He gets in, makes conversation, makes eye contact, looks at faces. I’m betting they smiled. I’m betting it changed something.

It’s a problem on the rez. To tourists, who think that all Indians look like Victor Mature, today’s round-faced, very large guys are scary. In fact, those guys themselves don’t like the way they look -- THEY want to look like buffalo Indians from the old days who spent every day out in the sun and wind, getting exercise by risking their lives on the war trail.

After I’d been off the rez and in Portland in the Seventies where people wore jeans and sneakers, I came back to teach on the rez. The kids were irritated with me until one of them finally leveled. “You’re a white woman, a TEACHER. You’re supposed to dress professional! And look at your hair!!” Appearances. Wear a suit, shine your shoes, and everyone around here will figure you’re either a Mormon missionary or the FBI.

I have yet to spot a Native American on either “Homicide” or “The Wire.” These shows are in Baltimore. There are Indians in Baltimore. I would bet five bucks there were Indians in the cast -- they just weren’t playing Indians. Probably some of those with Indian blood were black. Certainly almost every Hispanic/Latino had to have Indio blood. The screenwriters for these shows say that they were constantly brain-storming to figure out what they hadn’t done yet, and still they had no story line with an American Indian in it. I’m a little relieved, because it would be bound to have something corny about heritage and buffalo and feathers. Because these writers were urban, educated, and convinced that all Indians live west of the Mississippi.

It’s true enough though, that the Canadian crime shows -- a lot of which are shot in Vancouver, always have a LOT of Indians in them. It’s the Canadians who gave us Tantoo Cardinal and Graham Greene. (The Blackfeet on the US side supply horses and stunt riders.) So I shouldn’t be too hard on a show with a tap root deep in Baltimore for showing a Baltimore-type population.

When I was at Northwestern (class of ’61) back at the dawn of integration, one of my roommates was the daughter of a Chicago cop. She and her dad were convinced that black was the color of evil. The only black people on the campus in those days (most people were Jewish) were on the football team. For some reason this roommate was in a situation where she was talking to one of these guys and got into a pretty intense conversation. She came back to the room that night marveling, “I was talking to him and I forgot he was black! FORGOT !!”

Sometimes it’s good to remember and sometimes it’s good to forget, but the best is if the “mirror cells” behind your forehead pick up the “mirror cells” behind the other guy’s forehead and you both get on the same wavelength. The faces become transparent. I suppose it’s way too romantic to say you see into hearts.

Once, when NE Alberta street was still very black and dominated by gangs, I came back to Portland on a visit and innocently walked up the sidewalk past a barber shop. Luckily the guy in the chair was not getting a shave, because the barber was VERY surprised to see me go by. I waved and both of them, both black, waved back with HUGE grins. It was a contact ambush. Always get on the elevator.

PLAGUE AND PARTICLES

Only one of the Great Human Plagues has been eradicated so far in this ever-so-clever scientific world: smallpox. The suspicion is that someone somewhere (probably us) has a freezer of the last bits of it, so we can use it as a weapon. (Only if provoked, of course, though we provoke rather easily.) Cholera, malaria, flu, bubonic plague, typhoid, tuberculosis -- now joined by HIV-AIDS -- are somewhat treatable and almost completely preventable if their supporting ecological conditions (mostly poverty and hunger) are changed.

At one point I spent a lot of time reading about plagues. Ebola, for instance, is an inefficient disease because it is so virulent that people drop in their tracks in days, which is not always enough time to get to the next host. Another mistake on the part of plagues is the vulnerability of their vectors, which carry infection through the air, through liquids like water, and from one person to another through contact, which means that all those routes, if detected, can be interdicted. Using a condom, eliminating mosquitoes, purifying water, are all effective strategies but -- directly or indirectly -- the greatest ally a plague has is political. The lack of political will allows both the actual infections and their vectors to continue, even thrive and find new resources.

Lack of political will comes from stigmatizing (I always hear in my mind, “stinkmatizing”) and possibly criminalizing those who need help/money. The countervailing force is first, the awareness of other human beings as having value and empathizing with them, and second, the awareness that politicians can very well fall victim to stinkmatizing. They themselves, regardless of disease status, can become marked for exclusion. None of them is invulnerable to tragedy. They must see that though it is effective to have needy clients, whether they are constituents or whole nations, a failed nation is worth nothing and will prey on prosperity.

Many people working from many motives try to throw life-saving resources to suffering people. Most will choose one issue and put all their effort into it, perhaps because of personal experience with it. We become increasingly aware that ALL diseases are essentially molecular and therefore intermeshed, planetary, trans-species. A man just walked across Africa -- the gorillas and chimpanzees were gone. (They think ebola.) A man just drove the highways of Florida. The mammals were gone. (They think Asian pythons.) A disease is only one aspect of economics, ecology, transportation, and constant change even in the surface of the planet and its oceans expressed as climate, earthquakes, tsunamis. Even in the dynamics of the sun with its massive storms sending plasma curtains and particles our way.

I have chosen a location on this planet -- the east slope of the Rocky Mountains -- where I can age out with low resources and high spiritual renewal. For whatever reason, I’ve had access to major thinkers and accumulated a library that guides me to bigger libraries. Our diseases here are Alzheimers, diabetes, alcoholism, meth and violence. Our families are still stable enough -- for the most part -- to get the stink off loved ones, but we still struggle with racism and poverty. Some people seem unlovable.

Activists press me to respond to their issues and I’ve wondered what I should do. If the ethical rule I use is to do the greatest good for the greatest number, then I think I know what the answer is: the deepest cause of malignant loss and self-destruction is our understanding of what a human being is. We think we are nothing, maybe even a plague in ourselves, that can only be purified by apocalypse -- near universal destruction.

Therefore, I choose to address the nature of what it is to be human in an age that is discarding both anthropomorphism (thinking everything, including God, is in our image) and anthropocentrism (thinking that everything should be about us and what we want and need). I have a few realizations.

One is that there is no such thing as an individual. Solitary as I am, my head and heart are so crowded with people (I count animals, maybe even entities like trees or mountains or shorelines) that I sigh to meet new ones. A few are intensely meaningful to me, my very core.

The next thing is that my “identity” and consciousness (I think so I am) is a very small part of what goes on in my body. Eukaryotic cells formed over years of collaboration, drawing on the mitochondria in each cell, have been joined by a jillion little molecular creatures (QUITE real and physical though below human perception) from gut flora to eyelash fauna. Keeping them in harmony means emotion affects them and is produced by them.

To take this back to the subject of plague, my mother nearly died in the Spanish flu epidemic -- in fact, her doctor did. Her mother and grandmother died of cancer. These things intimidated her in a subtle way. She chose endurance maybe more than she ought to have, though she could be a good crusader as well. And endurance, tenacity, are valuable qualities. She is in me now. I am guarded, vigilant.

Constantly I have to fight awareness of all the bad things, mistakenly or on purpose, that I’ve done in my life. The failures, the fudges, the desertions -- I could create a virulent case of self-hate with no effort at all. Some people help me right along with my list of faults and others do NOT help when they refuse to admit my faults exist. Honesty is tough and slippery, but it is what I pursue. It can make me unwelcome, but if I can maintain honesty, it is productive. I get things done.

A human being is one element in an inconceivable interweaving of tiny forces. For two thousand years of Western religion we have tried to preserve our individual selves with a fantasy about everlastingness, but it has become pernicious. Now we must see that our salvation is in participation, to create memories and hope that will speak to others and break down stigma. At the same time we must be judicious, generous, disciplined in some ways and abandoned in others, demanding and forgiving, open and yet observant of boundaries in the molecular moments that add up to a life. If (when) we are taken by trauma or disease or simply old age, then we will have left glowing trajectories across the particle-detecting cloud chamber of the galaxy.

"THE PEOPLE WHO OWN THEMSELVES": A Family Story

Heather Devine’s book, “The People Who Own Themselves: Aboriginal Ethnogenesis in a Canadian Family 1660-1900,” manages to combine two forces: the story of a new people in a “strange empire” and the story of her own family. By focusing on the Dejarlais line of her ancestors, she has found the artesian force (I’m tempted to say “green fuse”) that drove her ancestors through times of such confusion that most people didn’t even know it happened. Some people are not very anxious to have you find out either.

With the clarity and careful footnoting of a competent academic and the warmth of a family member, Heather traces how the bringing of Euros and Iroquois onto the prairie parklands (potholes and poplar bluffs) to manage the fur trade collided with the first peoples already in residence, gradually created a new people called Metis/metis. (There are political and grammatical implications to the capitalization, but those are for hair-splitters.)

The first force is the most basic: the Euros needed women and took the ones available who were indigenous in the “fashion of the country.” No need to be coy about it. It was more than sexual: a household needs to be maintained. This connected the relatives of the woman, but not those of the man who were back in Europe or on the east coast. Sometimes the men discarded their wives when they left for home or moved on. Sometimes they went on to marry them in the Christian way, which meant living in a frontier town with a mixed population. In a generation, the children of mixed heritage chose whether to identify with their mother’s people or those of their father who were on the frontier: uncles and cousins. If they went back to their mother’s birth group, they were absorbed and continued as “Indians.” Some were left in between, “mixed,” but still had connections to both sides of their heritage. In time they intermarried with each other, forming a people. None of this was very easy, though it must have been inevitable, and the Hudson’s Bay Company stood over the whole economic picture, concerned with profit and forcing allegiances.

We forget much of the history of those times. As always, the Mississippi River stood as a boundary. On the right side of it, the country was French. On the left side of it, the country was Spanish. A decade or so before the American Revolution, England managed to rout the French from Quebec. Then the American Revolution drove a wave of English loyalists into Canada. This transformed Canada into an English Empire, but the western part, then called Rupert’s Land, was put into the hands of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Many of the residents remained culturally French; many of the Quebecois went west. When Jefferson “bought” Louisiana, it became part of the United States. In the southwest the criollo and mestizo people were forming as New Spain.

Closely following whatever records she could find, Heather traces out the story of her Quebecois ancestors who went west, formed alliances through marriage, became a mixed people, and then were confirmed (the right technical term!) by Christian missionaries asked to help to impose order on the unruly and sometimes suffering people. Hudson’s Bay, faced with the scarcity of furs caused by their own rewarding of overtrapping, cut loose anyone with weak ties to the management.

By the 19th century the term “The People Who Own Themselves” had come to mean those independent Metis bands with their strong sense of who they were. With the visionary leadership of Louis Riel and his cousin Dumont, the Metis resisted Canadian ownership by trying to form their own country. This was suppressed harshly -- Riel, Dumont and others captured and hung -- which sent the remainder out across the northern prairies to form, inform and energize people on both side of the 49th parallel, an arbitrary boundary unlike a river.

This story that mixes family ties with economics and idealism is of considerable concern in Canada because of the felt need to sort out people as indigenous versus immigrant. Are the metiz a people who need a reservation or should they simply be considered citizens? In the end many of the people decided for themselves, going back to blend in with the maternal tribe or accepting their fathers’ world.

All of this happened so recently and is mixed with so many other battles and yearnings that it has been hard to understand, particularly for the people themselves. I vividly recall a grandfather telling me about trying to explain to his grandson that they were not Blackfeet -- this was on the American Blackfeet reservation -- but neither were they Cree. “But then what are we?” asked the boy and the grandfather didn’t have the facts in order to explain. The emotions about his kind, called “Cree” here, ran high, both defensive and scorning, The boy really NEEDED to know. It was no vague itch about origins but an immediate social issue.

In the changing terms of what was powerful, what was economically viable, and what the signs and meanings of their lives were, strange anomalies appeared. A metis man who worked as a servant to a priest took to wearing a cassock and, away from the priest, imitated the “magic” for his people. One idea was that a suit of proper British clothes became a sign of near-supernatural power, because the Hudson’s Bay Company gave such a three-piece suit to their valued employees. On the US side, this was called “citizen’s clothes” and not so empowering. But I was impressed by my own observation that many white man’s imports became taboo to traditionalists, for instance, forks. Bundle Keepers were told not to turn their meat with forks.

Such uncontrollable elements as the ability to borrow to buy trading stocks or the means and distances of transportation were the real determiners of success. Against that, family loyalties, alliances by marriage, and skills learned on the land were all valuable but sometimes limited. Yet the people’s identity survives in stories, names, songs and attitudes. The MATL international corporation chose their first land seize victim without realizing he was Metis. Their mistake. And this Salois understood the big picture. He quickly found allies. And new enemies. That’s the way of history. Even though the international corporations have new names.