Celebrating Ten Years of Maria Popova's Brain Pickings, #6

Over the past several years, Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings the inventory of a meaningful life, has become one of my favorite sources of inspiration. Brain Pickings was born as an “eccentric personal record” of Maria’s studies and originally sent to seven readers. Now, it is included in the Library of Congress’s archive of “materials of historical importance.”

In celebration of her tenth year of Brain Pickings, Maria offers us ten of her life-earned core beliefs. This is rich stuff so they will be offered one at a time over the next ten weeks. If you’re impatient or want more, go to Brain Pickings and get your own subscription. Incredibly, this feast is still free … although she accepts donations, suggesting a donation level ranging from “a cup of tea to a good dinner.”

6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Here is the sixth in Maria Popova's list of things she loved reading and writing about:
 Susan Sontag on Storytelling, What It Means to Be a Moral Human Being, and Her Advice to Writers

Celebrating Ten Years of Maria Popova's Brain Pickings, #5

Over the past several years, Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings the inventory of a meaningful life, has become one of my favorite sources of inspiration. Brain Pickings was born as an “eccentric personal record” of Maria’s studies and originally sent to seven readers. Now, it is included in the Library of Congress’s archive of “materials of historical importance.”

In celebration of her tenth year of Brain Pickings, Maria offers us ten of her life-earned core beliefs. This is rich stuff so they will be offered one at a time over the next ten weeks. If you’re impatient or want more, go to Brain Pickings and get your own subscription. Incredibly, this feast is still free … although she accepts donations, suggesting a donation level ranging from “a cup of tea to a good dinner.”

5. When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.

Here is the fifth in Maria Popova's list of things she loved reading and writing about:
 Cry, Heart, But Never Break: A Remarkable Illustrated Meditation on Loss and Life

Standing Up for Standing Rock and Understanding the Shadow of Our History

Artist Mary-Ann Myers and Lawrence Laughing

Last night, people gathered in Grass Valley to raise awareness and supplies for the water protectors at Standing Rock. It was a time to share stories, song, support, prayer and food. 

I was drawn to the breath-taking Standing Rock poster (shown at left and described below) and had a delightful conversation with the artist and flute-player Mary-Ann Myers. There were also first-hand stories from people who recently returned from Standing Rock.

I had few expectations, but definitely did not expect a mental seismic event.

The first tremor came when Lawrence Laughing, a tall, gentle man with a soft, resonant voice said that we were standing on our own Standing Rock, right here in these beautiful foothills. 

He reminded us that the Maidu tribe had been decimated during the gold rush when almost 150,000 people were killed by gold and greed (according to Gold, Greed and Genocide by Pratap Chatterjee, now Executive Director at CorpWatch.)

With a mixture of delightful storytelling and a shocking reminder of our past, Johnny Moses, told us a mystical story about caribou and related a bit of his experience at an Indian residential school. For some reason I don't quite understand, the novel I've been working on this year has led me deeper and deeper into our dark past, especially as it relates to our dealings with the people who lived here when we arrived.

Perhaps the image that most brought home the horrors of the residential Indian schools was this picture of tiny handcuffs ... handcuffs for a child ... handcuffs made by someone, probably in large quantities ... handcuffs used by adults to control children. It's an artifact that carries a thousand stories, each of them horrific.

Lawrence Laughing added to my mental tumult later when he talked about technology as something other than a sign of progress. 

That thought connected with an ongoing conversation with another friend who had recently returned from Europe where time took on a different perspective when she toured a cathedral with a glass floor that revealed older structures. It struck her that the European mindset judged progress on structures … roads, cathedrals, waterworks, bridges and so on.

Therefore, when they (we) came to the Americas, all we saw was empty space, a void to be filled, a people without civilization, since civilization was judged by things made by man.

I don’t know where this thinking is going, but my mind feels like a river that has been knocked out of its channel. 

In the meantime, here is a beautiful piece of music by Lawrence Laughing

Click here to listen to Lawrence Laughing "I Wish You Peace"

 And a full view of Mary-Ann Myers' Standing Rock poster as described by the artist:

• Background represents water...or even water with oil in it...which is exactly what we don't want to happen.
• The background is a college Lakota student embracing his ancestors.
• The woman bending down as if crying is a photo of a Lakota pow wow dancer and she was involved in the 1975 Longest walk that Dennis Banks and others organized after the second seige of Wounded Knee.
• Then there is Sitting Bull, who once said we are poor but we are free. No white man controls our footsteps.  If we must die...we die defending our right.
• Sitting Bull was the last of the "wild" chiefs but in reality, he is the first American Indian protester.  
• So, this college student embraces his past but is sad because his people were oppressed for 500 years and it is still happening.  
•  We must stop this...it will take prayer.

Why Has Standing Rock Captured Our Attention and Imagination?

Story: OutsideOnline.com; Photo: Sara Lafleur-Vetter

“The earth is a spirit, the water is a spirit, and if you have no spirit, and you have no connection to those things, it will be easy to destroy them and not even care.”

-- Quese IMC 

(born Marcus Frejo Little Eagle) 

 

Why is Standing Rock such a phenomena when other, similar actions didn’t catch the public attention?

 

Last night I talked to a woman in her 60s who drove 1500 miles to Standing Rock, who got arrested (with about 30 other people) for obstruction of a government activity, who spent time in a dog cage (a large chain link structure within the jail). She was one of several “returnees” who spoke at a meeting at the Unitarian-Universalist church in Grass Valley, CA.

Photo: Daniella Zalcman

Her story wasn't awful. She wasn’t  shot, maced or pepper-sprayed. She was strip searched and held for almost fourteen hours, but she did not feel like she had been mistreated. She did wonder why she was arrested for obstructing a government activity when she was actually obstructing a corporate activity. Interesting question.

Her story and the story of the other returnees made me wonder why. Why they went. Why they were willing to be arrested. Why they spent their time, money and energy to stand up for this particular issue. 

It could be the issue … water is life. The $3.7 BILLION pipeline crosses a river that impacts the lives of 17 million people and was declared potentially hazardous by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers when it was originally proposed near Bismarck, the capital of North Dakota.

It could be the people … Lakota tribespeople putting their lives on the line for their land and for our future rather than for money or power or fame.

It could be the time … perhaps people are waking up to the fact that we need to wake up, speak up, stand up ... that waiting for "them" to fix "our" problems is magical thinking.

It could be the place … a place that calls to some sleeping part of us that remembers an earlier time, a simpler time, a time when we understood and respected the fundamentals of life ... but also calls to the greed of developers and corporations who see it as a nowhere place, an empty-space-on-the-map place.

It could be the anger and fear … clearly highlighted by the recent election, anger and fear are major forces in the world right now.

It could also be the words: Standing Rock … Words that go beyond words into metaphors that carry the power to energize and engage.

Standing Rock. Standing up for what’s important. Standing firm for what we believe in. Standing tall, willing to take risks for the seven generations of the future. Standing out, resisting the forces of power and money and greed.

Standing Rock. Strong, still standing, visible, solid, earth, the planet we live on.

It makes me ask:

When the world is sitting,

What am I standing up for?

What are WE standing up for?

What are YOU standing up for?

Article:

50 Museum Directors Sign Letter Supporting Standing Rock Sioux Tribe

Notes: From Mark Sundeen's article for OutsideOnline.com: (entire article highly recommended.)

"Two of our country's biggest issues, racism and climate change, have collided on a North Dakota reservation. This week, I loaded up my station wagon with water and supplies and drove down for a look at a historic demonstration that could shape the national dialogue going forward."

"In 2014, the proposed route of DAPL went through Bismarck, the capital of North Dakota, with roughly 61,000 residents, 92 percent of them white. After the Corps determined that the pipeline could contaminate drinking water, it was rerouted to pass by Standing Rock. “That’s environmental racism,” said Kandi Mossett, of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation in North Dakota and an organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network." 


"The Standing Rock lawsuit may hinge on the definition of sovereignty. The law required the Army Corps of Engineers to consult with the tribe before it permitted the pipeline, but it didn’t require that the tribe approve. So Standing Rock contends that its wishes were overruled.
 
“When we need help, they say we are sovereign,” said Mossett. “But when it comes to development of our resources—oil, gas, coal, uranium, water—then they step in see how much money the state can get.”

"The United Nations appears to agree. On Wednesday, its Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues released a statement that the failure to consult with the Sioux on DAPL violated the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a resolution President Obama signed in 2010."


The Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program authorized nine dams—five on Indian land, displacing those who lived along the banks. Standing Rock lost 55,000 acres, while adjacent Cheyenne River Reservation lost 150,000 acres. According to historian Michael Lawson, author of Dammed Indians, “The Oahe Dam destroyed more Indian land than any other public works project in America.” Estes said his elders “died of heartache.”

Speaking of historic conflicts between tribal nations: "They (Native Americans at Standing Rock) rattled off these 19th-century events like they happened yesterday, and this gathering at Standing Rock was occasion for a new round of history making. The site was called Seven Councils Camp, indicating the first time all bands of Lakota had gathered in one place in more than a century. 

"While I saw passion and anger and solemnity, the main thing I saw was joy. Travelers were reuniting with long-lost relatives. Parents brought small children, and an impromptu homeschool taught them to ride horses and make fry bread."

"The Yakima Nation in Washington chartered a tractor trailer filled with pallets of fresh fruit and bottled water. Small donations were also received: somebody mailed four packets of Lipton noodles. When I asked how long they planned to the stay, most said, 'Till the end.'”

"I met Nick Estes, a Lower Brule Sioux from South Dakota who remembered that when he was a child, his grandparents told stories about the wonderful Missouri River. “But after the 1940s, the stories stopped.” The Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program authorized nine dams—five on Indian land, displacing those who lived along the banks. Standing Rock lost 55,000 acres, while adjacent Cheyenne River Reservation lost 150,000 acres."

 

Standing Up for Standing Rock Sacramento

"The moral soul of this continent 
is at Standing Rock, 

and at the moment that soul 
is being beaten, 

maced, pepper-sprayed, tear-gassed, and locked up 

by a militarized police force acting on behalf of foreign oil companies."

-- Josh Fox,  Oscar-nominated filmmaker 

I've never been beaten, maced, pepper-sprayed, tear-gassed or locked up.

            Maybe it's time.

I'm a writer living a simple life. However, the novel I'm working on has taken me into strange territory. 

I "sorta" knew the story: the cowboys didn't all wear white hats, the government didn't always keep its promises, the only good Indian was not a dead Indian.

Researching the story has pulled me deeper and deeper into the shadow side of our history. The stories are gruesome: mass slaughter of people and animals, wanton poisoning of lands and waters and air, callous discrimination to the point of brutality against minorities. But, for every one of these stories, there was at least one story of courage, generosity, and compassion which made it easy to look at the bright side and think the other things would be fixed.

2016 may go down in history as the year we lost our innocence, or maybe, it's just the year I lost mine.

It has been coming for a long time as one-by-one, we lost trust and faith in our doctors, lawyers, ministers, journalists, business leaders, and police. Once, we believed our government was "of the people, by the people, for the people." Now, we know it's largely of the money, by the money, for the money."

Nevada County Water Protectors

Nowhere is it being played out more clearly than at Standing Rock, where a few thousand people are
trying to protect their sacred lands as well as the water for 17 million people. Today, a lot of people across the country gathered in solidarity with those water protectors at Standing Rock.

I was with the Sacramento group and it was a peaceful event of probably 2-300 people. There was a calm police presence and no counter-protestors. Here are a few photos from the day.

Celebrating Ten Years of Maria Popova's Brain Pickings, #4

Over the past several years, Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings the inventory of a meaningful life, has become one of my favorite sources of inspiration. Brain Pickings was born as an “eccentric personal record” of Maria’s studies and originally sent to seven readers. Now, it is included in the Library of Congress’s archive of “materials of historical importance.”

In celebration of her tenth year of Brain Pickings, Maria offers us ten of her life-earned core beliefs. This is rich stuff so they will be offered one at a time over the next ten weeks. If you’re impatient or want more, go to Brain Pickings and get your own subscription. Incredibly, this feast is still free … although she accepts donations, suggesting a donation level ranging from “a cup of tea to a good dinner.”

4. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.

Most important, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?

Here is the fourth in Maria Popova's list of things she loved reading and writing about:
James Baldwin on Freedom and How We Imprison Ourselves.

I Stand Up for All Pieces of Peace

Like 62 million Americans, I woke up on November 9th stunned, flooded with fear for our country, fear for our future, fear for the millions of young people and children who were unable to vote for their own futures.

I also woke up chastened that I did not understand the depth of fear, anger and frustration that ran so deep that good people were willing to vote for change regardless of the shape that carried it into the voting booth. Michael Moore says we weren’t paying attention and I have to agree and accept my share of this disaster.

Like most of us, I want to know what to do now. Like most of us, I feel like I’m barreling through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It would be so easy to get stuck in any of the first four.

Recently, I heard someone talking about the bubble those of us called “baby boomers" grew up in and mistakenly thought was “normal.” We called it the “American Dream” and thought it was a contract with the future: we would work hard and the world would give us education, a comfortable home, a life-time job with health care benefits, and two-point-three wonderful kids.

It was a seductive bubble that made us blind to the people and events outside the golden dream. It made us fiercely protective of the bubble. And, as the bubble began to shrink and there wasn’t enough room for everyone, fear grew.

Years ago, under different circumstances, but similar pressures, the poet Langston Hughes asked, “What happens to a dream deferred?” His haunting poem, Harlem, ends with:

     Maybe it just sags

      like a heavy load.

      Or does it explode?

November 9th, 2017, the world woke up to an explosion. 

 

   Things are different now. The pieces will never fit back together the way they were. As a matter of fact, they are still exploding. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reports receiving over 200 hate-based complaints in the three days after the election. Anti-black, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim incidents have spiked even more than after 9-11 reports an official from SPLC.

So, we come back to the question of what do we do? How do we continue the work to find peace in a world that seems hell-bent on exploding all semblance of peace.

Obviously, I have no big answer, but I have a small answer that will help me sleep at night. And, it comes from a program Pacifica Graduate Institute created called Pondering Peace in a World of Turmoil. In response to their call for submissions, I submitted a piece of art titled: Pieces of Peace that incorporated three levels of words.

 

     Basic needs of all humans: food, shelter, safety, knowledge, work.

     Individual values supporting peace: gratitude, openness, hope, expression, courage.

     Interdependent values supporting peace: equality, justice, compassion, forgiveness, generosity.

My small answer is to stand up for all the Pieces of Peace.

One of the most basic of our needs - food - actually includes clean air, clean water and clean food.

There is a group of people standing up for those needs at a place called Standing Rock. They are standing up for all of us, trying to protect our water and our air as well as their sacred lands. Yet, they are being treated like criminals.

Tomorrow I will stand up for them as part of a nationwide demonstration of support. Thereafter, I will do the following:

-- I will strengthen my own peace values of gratitude, openness, hope, expression, courage.
-- I will stand up with my words and deeds for the basic needs of all people: food, shelter, safety, knowledge, work.
-- I will promote with my words and deeds all values that create a sustainable, peaceful society: equality, justice, compassion, forgiveness, generosity.

Celebrating Ten Years of Maria Popova's Brain Pickings, #3

Over the past several years, Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings the inventory of a meaningful life, has become one of my favorite sources of inspiration. Brain Pickings was born as an “eccentric personal record” of Maria’s studies and originally sent to seven readers. Now, it is included in the Library of Congress’s archive of “materials of historical importance.”

In celebration of her tenth year of Brain Pickings, Maria offers us ten of her life-earned core beliefs. This is rich stuff so they will be offered one at a time over the next ten weeks. If you’re impatient or want more, go to Brain Pickings and get your own subscription. Incredibly, this feast is still free … although she accepts donations, suggesting a donation level ranging from “a cup of tea to a good dinner.”

3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.

Lynne Twist states, "Generosity and gratitude are linked. It's what I call the well of being that's infinite. And, when we're in touch with that, we're naturally generous. When we're naturally generous, we're naturally grateful because gratefulness is the experience of the great fullness of our lives.

Here is the third in Maria Popova's list of things she loved reading and writing about:
Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation