Afterthought #3 - Two-Dimensional Tools

Detail of a friend's quilt

 "As a writer, I'm trying to represent a ten-dimensional world with a two-dimensional tool which is writing."

     ~ Junot Diáz   (Pulitzer Prize-winning author of  The Brief  Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)

Isn’t that what all artists do? Some use the two-dimensional tools of words on a page, notes on a staff, or paint on a canvas. Others use three-dimensional tools of fabric, clay, wood, stone, steel, or glass. That’s what art does—it portrays and makes sense of the complexities, the multiple dimensions, of life.

Remembering Manzanar

Exclusion Notices (from NPS website)

Today, March 21, 2012, marks the 70^th anniversary of the arrival of the first prisoners at Manzanar, a concentration camp in southern California. Grace Ito Coan, a member of Sacramento Friends Meeting, was among the U.S. residents of Japanese ancestry imprisoned there from 1942-1945. I wouldn’t have noted this day if not for Grace’s story, “Manzanar: Forever in the Past?” in the current issue of Western Friend. Her account put a personal face on a sad and painful time in U.S. history.

Manzanar was the first of ten camps authorized on February 19, 1942 when President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. This action, in response to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, moved nearly 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans into isolated relocation centers in Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming as well as Manzanar.  

Grace Ito Coan writes of Manzanar’s transformation from a fruit-growing colony in Owens Valley on the east side of the Sierras to a desert when water was diverted to Los Angeles. After the government’s relocation order, that desert became home to 10,000 people in a  “…city one mile square, enclosed by barbed wire and guarded from towers by military police with search lights and guns pointed inward.”

Ansel Adams photo, 1943 - Manzanar Relocation Center from the Tower 

Often with less than a week’s lead-time, people were ordered to the temporary, tar paper-covered barracks. Grace describes, “…dust seeping through the knotholes and cracks. We were to sleep on metal cots, and we filled our mattresses with straw.”  She and thousands of others were forced from their homes, businesses, and communities simply because they were of Japanese ancestry. Nearly three-quarters of them were U.S. citizens.

I live on a thirty-square-mile island with about 2200 people. I try to imagine five times that number squeezed into an area about the size of our village center. I can’t. But Grace’s story in Western Friend and many more stories and images of Manzanar at a National Park Service website bring attention to a shameful time in history.

Although these imprisonments occurred years before I was born, I’m embarrassed by my limited knowledge of them. It wasn’t until I moved to Seattle and started attending University Friends Meeting (UFM) that I learned more of this history.

One of UFM’s founders, Floyd Schmoe, among others in the Meeting, kept these concerns before us. Schmoe’s son-in-law, Gordon Hirabayashi, had defied the government curfew and evacuation orders, calling them a gross violation of Constitutional rights. He was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned, and eventually appealed his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Although the Supreme Court initially upheld his conviction, efforts to overturn it resumed in the 1980s, culminating in his judicial vindication in 1987 and redress for the victims of internment. Hirabayashi died earlier this year at age 94.

Each year, over 1,000 people from diverse backgrounds, including students, teachers, community members, clergy and former incarcerees, make a pilgrimage to Manzanar to commemorate the unjust imprisonment. This year’s pilgrimage also marks the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the Manzanar National Historic Site. Dr. Mitchell Maki, the lead author of Achieving the Impossible Dream: How Japanese Americans Obtained Redress, will give a keynote address on the topic, “Why Remember?” Grace’s story and her urgings that we remain vigilant so Manzanar never happens again give ample reasons to remember.  

The Western Friend article moved me to honor this anniversary.  The word anniversary is from the Latin anniversarius ‘returning yearly,’ from annus ‘year’ + versus ‘turning.’ Today, I’m turning my thoughts to Manzanar and Grace.

For more information about the pilgrimage, visit -http://blog.manzanarcommittee.org/category/manzanar-pilgrimage/

Other resources about the internment:

http://www.pbs.org/childofcamp/history/index.html

http://afsc.org/story/celebrating-life-and-work-gordon-hirabayashi

Conflict

Conflict. Disagreement. Opposing viewpoints. I don’t much like any of them, especially when they involve me and those I’m in relationship with. Some people tell me they like controversy, spirited opposition, debate and argument. They say it energizes them, excites them, gets their juices flowing. All that conflict does for me is make my stomach churn.

So, at Meeting last Sunday, when our Worship-Sharing time focused on queries about resolving conflict, I did a lot of deep breathing.   As we settled into silence, we were asked to consider these queries from North Pacific Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice:

When problems and conflicts arise, do we make timely endeavors to resolve them in a spirit of love and humility?

How do we use our diversity for the spiritual growth of our Meeting?

Are we prepared to let go of our individual desires and let the Holy Spirit lead us to unity?

In the silence, I sat with these questions.

Make timely endeavors to resolve conflict? I usually put it off as long as possible.

Use diversity for spiritual growth? I subscribe more to the “birds of a feather, flock together” approach.

Let go of my individual desires and be led by Spirit? Sure, once my fingers are pried away from their grip on my conviction that I’m right.

I know that many people throughout the world face the kind of conflict that threatens their lives. I’m blessed to live in a time and place that is not fraught with such violence, fortunate to rarely encounter hostility in my daily life. And yet, I don’t feel in unity with everyone, at all times. Whether it’s in my Quaker Meeting, at work, in my family, or among friends and community, sometimes tempers flare, opposing views swirl, or anger erupts. When that happens, there’s the familiar churn of my stomach. My heart races, my throat closes up, my head throbs. I’m afraid.

The conflicts most common in my life stir fears of discovering I’m wrong or have made a mistake. I succumb to old beliefs from childhood that there is a “right” way to act or believe, as if there is only one right answer. I fear disapproval and rejection. In introductory psychology, I learned that animals respond to fear in one of two ways – fight or flight. I don’t want to do either, yet engaging with the differences brings a pounding to my chest.

Quaker practice has taught me to listen, to lead with a question instead of defending my opinion. When I remember to ask, rather than answer, I open myself to the possibility that there is something for me to learn.

I wish that the path to resolving conflict wasn’t bordered with so much humility, patience, and letting go. What I know experimentally, though, is that it is in times of conflict, times when I listen deeply to the words and beyond the words, that I grow.

Afterthought #2

Back in December, I wrote about my new 2012 calendar and its inspirations for a simpler life. Two months in, I continue to look to it for strength to not overfill the days. Recently, support came from another source— No Ordinary Time by Jan Phillips. Subtitled “A Book of Hours for a Prophetic Age,” Jan draws on the Middle Ages practice of staying spiritually mindful all throughout the day. Each chapter is devoted to a day of the week, and a reading for Wednesday spoke to me. It’s Jan’s “To Be List,” in the form of a poem.

In honor of having an extra day on the calendar this year, today I’m going to focus on my To Be List, rather than the To Do List.

To Be List

2-29-12

Patient

Open-hearted

Grounded

Joyful

Beloved

Welcoming

Compassionate

Observant

Grateful

What’s on your To Be List?

The Job of the Writer

Ten years ago, I printed up business cards with the title Writer under my name thinking that if that’s what the card says, that’s what I am.  Now, I don't have to read that card to know that writing is my job, but some days, at the end of a writing session, I’ll leave my desk with doubts about whether I’m called to this work. Well aware of the needs and problems crying for attention, questions about the value of putting words, my words, on paper ring in my ears.

I know that I’m not the only writer who frets. One of my writing program classmates got this response when she typed writer/copy editor into her online tax form: Please enter a valid occupation. One of the faculty, an award-winning children’s author, admitted, “To this day, whenever I write down writer as my profession, I imagine the person on the other side of this transaction changing it to unemployed.”

Recently, I received affirmation for my call to writing at the Seattle Repertory Theater’s premier of How to Write a New Book for the Bible, by Bill Cain. The play, originally written as a memoir, is based on Cain’s experiences caring for his dying mother.  The main character is also named Bill; flashbacks portray Bill's and his brother’s childhood as well as his parents’ relationship and his father’s death. “These are exquisite human beings,” Cain says in the Rep’s magazine, Encore, “and I wanted to ritualize in some way the wonder of their lives as a way of celebrating them.”

Not that Cain’s parents didn't have their flaws or that his family was perfect. There are plenty of scenes of conflict between the parents, misunderstanding between the brothers, and feelings of inadequacy and failure.  A classic struggle emerges when Bill’s widowed mother’s health begins to fail and she needs help to remain in her home. Just like Cain, the playwright, Bill is a Jesuit priest as well as a writer. Perceived by his mother and brother as not having a “real job,” Bill gets tapped to be the live-in caregiver.

Cain explains that his ministry as a priest is “to go into the world, find the presence of God there and celebrate it.”  He thinks that’s a good description of what those working in theater do as well, bringing attention to what is “neglected and holy.”

In the second act, this moment of reflection by Bill took my breath away. “The jobs of writer and priest are closely related. In both, you point and say, Look. Look there. That person you haven’t noticed—he, she matters.”

The writers I most admire do this in their writing, pointing to the people, places, and issues that we don’t notice—and that matter. Bill Cain’s play pointed to the value of writing and left me with a useful query to guide me in my work:

Who or what that is neglected and holy am I to call attention to?

A Little Bit of Wisdom

       

            

The last day of Spring Residency for my writing program (Northwest Institute of Literary Arts), guest faculty Kathleen Dean Moore talked with the Craft of Nonfiction class about writing essays.  A philosophy professor at Oregon State University, Kathleen writes prose that questions and celebrates our cultural and spiritual connections to Earth in a style reminiscent of poet Mary Oliver. 

Taking notes on my laptop as Kathleen spoke, my fingers barely kept up with the wisdom she shared. Here is one of her gems:

Every essay is connections and a little bit of wisdom tucked into experience. 

I took in a quick breath and felt tears stinging my nose and filling my eyes as Kathleen spoke. That’s why I read essays, to find connection and that little bit of wisdom tucked into a story. Kathleen’s wisdom usually is surrounded by experiences in nature—such as watching an osprey taking time to notice a shadow in the water and then having the courage to dive.  She says that’s the work of nature writers (I would argue all writers):  “observe patiently, lovingly; keep watch for shadow; plummet toward it and engage it.”

That’s what I want my writing to be.  Sometimes there’s only a very little bit of wisdom.  Most of the time, I don’t know it’s there until I start to write. I’ve tried to be organized and systematic in my writing. Sometime I write out a rough outline, topics and themes sprouting out from an experience or an insight. That technique does help me to have an idea of where I’m going in my writing. But usually I don’t know which road I’m heading down until I wrap my fingers around a pen, or place them on the keyboard, and let them lead me across the page.

I have a similar experience in Meeting for Worship when I quiet my mind enough to open myself to that essence or wisdom beyond me.  And just as in my writing, that opening and centering usually takes me to unexpected places.

Kathleen also challenged us to think about the kind of writing we should do.

“In a ‘world of wounds,’ it’s not enough to write about a marsh as it’s being bulldozed for a K-Mart parking lot,” she said. “We’ve run out of time; we have to move quickly and reach a wider audience through new venues such as newspapers, blogs, and radio essays.”

To know the kind of writing we should do, she urged us to answer three questions:  

What are my gifts?

What breaks my heart?

What are the world’s deepest needs?

“Your calling is at the intersection of these,” she said.

Maybe I should follow the behavior of the osprey both when I settle into worship and to write—take whatever time is needed to listen patiently and lovingly, keeping watch for shadow. There’s plenty of that as I open myself to my own flaws, mistakes, and regrets. And observing more widely, I’m aware of the shadows of hurts, disappointments, and wrongs in my community, my country, and the world. I want the courage of the osprey to dive deeply into some of those shadows and to engage with them. But I often just skim the surface and pull back to my comfortable spot of gratitude for the blessings in my life.

I’m discovering more all the time the amount of courage needed to write the connections and tuck in a little bit of wisdom. I often stop myself because I know that I possess just a portion of knowledge of an issue or a situation. But my portion (or yours) might just be what is needed for greater wisdom to emerge. I want to be courageous enough to shine the light on my little bit of wisdom.

Afterthought #1

A writing friend, Charlotte Morganti, blogs regularly at Morganti Writes. Most Fridays she posts an “Itty Bitty”— typically a quote or anecdote and a few words of her own reflection. They often inspire me as I head into the weekend.

Charlotte’s Itty Bitties remind me of a practice in some Quaker meetings of a time for “Afterthoughts.”  After meeting for worship ends, silence continues for a few more minutes during which members are invited to share thoughts or reflect on the morning's worship. Those words often inspire me as I head into the week.

Today I’m adding a new category to my blog called “Afterthoughts.” I expect to use this hybrid drawn from my writing and Quaker communities for brief reflections on headlines, quotes, comments overheard, maybe even bumper stickers.

Here’s Afterthought #1.

Last Friday I attended a pediatric nursing update and heard a startling statistic from child psychologist Christopher McCurry.  He claims that every day, each of us has to depend on about 2000 people we’ve never met.  “Like the people who run the water treatment plant and make sure what comes out of my tap is drinkable,” he said. For me, I think of the engineers who designed the highways, the electricians who grounded the wiring in my house, the captains who pilot the ferries I commute on.

Sure, sometimes people make mistakes and my trust is shaken.  And the headlines seize on those rare, but often devastating, times when someone we depend on intentionally causes harm by abusing power.  But I take comfort in Dr. McCurry’s reminder of our interdependence and of how trustworthy those 2000 people I rely on are.

One more afterthought:  For more information about Quaker worship as well as the Quaker practice of sharing afterthoughts, visit Quaker Information Center.