21 January 2007

Beauty Lies

Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.
What does the violet know or care that I look at her and my heart overflows? "So beautiful," I sigh and she has no response.
Yesterday, after a night in Hell, Love conspired to bring deep healing to my troubled soul. Marcie brought flowers and incense and Carnival decorations to put a little Mardi Gras cheer in my home. We went out to search for cigarettes--American Spirit Regular Full-Bodied Taste...who sells these in Gulfport? The clerk at the smoke shop where I've once purchased my brand could not stop looking at me. "You are beautiful," she kept saying.
They didn't have my brand, but she took my hands and asked where I was from and when I was born and complimented my hat, my jacket, my aura. "You are so good. I want to know you," she said. "Your eyes are so deep and I trust you," she said.
I was confounded. I am always confounded when someone says I am beautiful. What do they really mean? I am not beautiful so what are they actually saying?
When I am mistaken for a man, I think Yes, they're right. I am a mannish woman without feminine physical beauty.
At a speaking engagement in Indiana, ST faced a heckler who accused her of being a man in woman's clothing. She could not proceed with her address for the uproar. The heckler demanded that she go into a private room with the women in attendance and show her breasts, to prove she was a woman. But she would not.
"I will show my breast, but to the entire congregation," she told the gathering as she undid the buttons. "It is not my shame but yours that I do this."
And so my more-than-a-mouthful breasts might prove my womanhood. How do I prove or disprove my beauty?

17 January 2007

Prayer

She smoked until almost the end. As a very old woman, she told Elizabeth Cady Stanton that after years of travel on segregated trains where blacks were relegated to the smoking car, she smoked in self-defense—preferring to swallow her own smoke to another’s.

In her early 70’s, she tried “again” to stop smoking and was in her third smoke-free month, according to a reporter for the National Anti-Slavery Standard, in December of 1868. She renounced alcohol after the religious conversion that launched her onto the road but remained “an inveterate smoker” for years, despite having many friends in the reformist movement against tobacco.

When she went to Washington, DC after the Civil War to work in the Freedmen’s Bureau, she grew uncomfortable with the conflict between her advocacy of thrift, hygiene and self-discipline among the former slaves and her cigarette smoking. She tried then, perhaps for the first time, to quit.

Someone asked her once, “Aunt Sojourner, you smoke, and you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven because there is nothing so unclean as the breath of a smoker. What do you say to that?”

ST: “Why, Brudder Goodrich, I expect to leave my breff behind me when I go to heaven.”




In January 1869, she “wrote” to her friend Amy Post:
I want you to let it be known …[i]t was the Spirit that spoke to me to give up tobacco, and I long had been wishing to do so, but could not, . …I have had no taste or appetite to take it again. The dear Lord has filled the part that longed with His own love and spirit, and now my great prayer is that all who smoke may have the Spirit that spoke to me to work in them to destroy the desire for tobacco.

13 January 2007

Reaching into the Dark

Daily Horoscope for Sagittarius

The alignment of hot-headed Mars and unforgiving Pluto in your sign reminds you that not every thought is light and optimistic. Reach into the dark and mysterious realms to discover the magic. Even if you are frightened of what you don't understand, remember that the unknown transforms into an important ally as your awareness grows.
Saturday, January 13, 2007


I have believed the Unknown may lie without or within me. And I have also believed there is no "without" and "within"--there is only "with."

Being
With

what Is


Researching Sojourner's life, my most frequent recurring regret--and provocation to ponder--is that there is no true and original record of her thoughts and feelings. She could neither read nor write. The technology did not exist to capture and preserve her spoken words or the sound of her voice.

Her speaking voice was described as "low" and "masculine." Her singing voice has been described as "powerful." She spoke with a Dutch accent. Imagination brings her voice to me sometimes. More often she comes as a presence; I feel her. Any of the several photographic images of her I have seen come to mind. And I don't hear her voice as much as appreciate a deep, eloquent silence that floods my soul with understandings.

Faith. Pain. Hope.

In the Introduction to Jacqueline Bernard's Book "Journey Toward Freedom: The Story of Sojourner Truth" Nell Irvin Painter says "Sojourner Truth's memory is a study in the power of words." The study is of necessity accomplished in an indirect fashion, meanders through speculations and translations by reporters once, twice or further removed from Source.

Difficult to impossible to "know" her and the power of her words directly. Sometimes she invented songs and for awhile sold transcribed lyric sheets for 5 cents following her speaking engagements. Has a single one of these sheets survived? My heart races to think of seeing or touching one of these sheets today. It would not bring the sound of her voice -- or direct answers to any of the countless questions I have about her -- and transcription is often only another layer of separation and translation.




Still, as a thing with a life, the song sheet might speak in a similar eloquent silence as her presence. It might bring knowing and understanding through my skin if I could touch it; or through my eyes--as I read the lines, the sensation of her voice entering the awareness of the transcriber might tumble down through Time, to me.

Coupled with my imagination and love for her, it might allow me to reach into the dark and find her, to touch Sojourner.

11 January 2007

Nothing to Fear but Fear

Since my wandering began, the most common line of questioning I face from other people revolves around fear of one kind or another. And it's not that I don't feel fear--it strikes my heart perhaps as often as anyone else. It's just that I keep going--Fear doesn't stop me.

Fear of the Unknown is the most prevalent fear I've perceived in folks. Where will you sleep, where will you get money, what happens if you get sick, how will friends and family know whether you're okay... What if, what if, what if.

Shortly after I arrived in New Orleans, I met a woman who had lost home and possessions to Katrina and the floods. When she discovered I was a sojourner, she was full of fear-based questions for me. I answered each question in turn and she finally said, "Oh, I could never live that way. I need more security." I was stunned into speechlessness for a moment--security? She believed that her life was more secure than mine even after all that had happened to her in the last several months. I was astonished.

"You have lived working 9 to 5, with locks on your possessions and money in the bank and I have lived with none of this. Yet, look at us: I have lost nothing and you have lost much. Whose life is more secure?"

I believe the world is a beautiful dangerous place. We make our way without guarantees or assurances. Having things, as millions across the Gulf Coast know all too well by now, does not ensure safety or comfort or protection. Anything can happen at any time.

There are stories of Sojourner Truth's life in which she faced hostile, racist mobs in her travels. She faced physical harm in these situations but the only reported injuries she suffered in her life occurred while she was safely ensconced in slavery, while she had shelter and food and clothing provided by an owner.

There are several stories that tell of how she calmed a hostile crowd with her voice, singing or speaking to them. Years ago, when I was young and foolish, in my search for love and companionship, I wound up in some situations where I faced physical injury or death. In each episode, I was afraid but kept my wits about me and was able to talk my way out of danger but always in a one-to-one format. Could I talk my way out if I were facing a crowd?

I am more afraid of what can happen to me while sitting still and playing by the rules than I am of developments on the road. More afraid of becoming disarmed through the complacency that can accompany living a "normal" life. My mottos on the road have been

--choose from Love not Fear
--I have everything I need
--the Earth is my home

I realize that the tide has turned now and that I am choosing to wander not because it is my mission as it was for Sojourner. I am choosing to wander, at least in part, because I am afraid of settling down. I am challenging this fear now by taking an apartment and establishing accounts with utility companies and accepting a job with the Turkey Creek Community Initiatives. (www.turkey-creek.org)

Where is the love in this? It is perhaps not yet Love that I feel for TCCI and all the folks connected with it, but it is something like love for the work that they do that sustains me in these first scary days of settling.

I pray I can retain my sense of freedom, my belief that Gulfport is only one small room in my Earth home and the rest of Home is just beyond the doorway, that whether I am here or on the move I will continue to have everything I need and that even while I focus on my work with TCCI, the greater Story continues to unfurl.

05 January 2007

The Life of Things


I visited a great museum in Casper WY--the National Historic Trails Interpretive Center (www.wy.blm.gov/nhtic). Between 1840 and 1870, more than half a million people crossed the western plains of North America searching for free land, freedom of religion or gold. No matter their point of departure, their paths merged at the last "easy" place to cross the North Platte River before the final leg of their journeys to the Oregon Territory, the Great Salt Lake Valley and the gold mines of California and Montana.

The museum sits on a high bluff that overlooks the crossing-over point and a breathtaking 360-degree view of rugged Wyoming landscape stretching for as far as the eye can see. On the day I visited, the wind was lively, cold and full of snow. The flag flew at half-mast in observance of Gerald Ford's death the previous day.

Why didn't I think to stop in the history museums of all the places I've visited these last three years? Besides providing a broader context for getting acquainted with a place, learning about others who have traveled where I am traveling offers a lot of food for thought (and blogging).



Looking at the artifacts on display, I thought again about material possessions in the lives of sojourners. Like me, at the start of their journey West, the immigrants made sometimes difficult decisions about what to carry and what to leave behind. And along the way events transpired that necessitated lightening their load even further. Sometimes they took on new weight, appropriating goods abandoned by travelers who preceded them. Sometimes after a death in their party, they made decisions about whether or not to take on the possessions of the deceased.

Pony Express riders also passed at the site. They were given "a pistol, intended for defending the mail against attack, and a Bible to keep them moral."

The longer I stay in a place, the more material objects I accumulate. To move from New Orleans to Gulfport last week, I had to pack boxes. A small pick-up couldn't hold everything. Among the things I am carrying to Gulfport that I did not carry into New Orleans in November 2005,

  • bed
  • TV
  • DVD player
  • desk
  • side table
  • altar table
  • 4 each of plates, saucers, bowls, salad plates and coffee cups; forks, table knives and teaspoons
  • 9 or 10 books of piano music
  • a guitar
  • 4 wooden chairs
  • a set of pots and pans and skillets
  • 5 or six bath towels
  • a boom box and about 60 CDs
Nothing I own defends against attack. Nothing keeps me moral. But I do alright.
ST owned a house for a little while in Massachusetts after years on the road. I don't remember now how she lost it (I'll look it up when I finally get the rest of my stuff from New Orleans). It was several more years before she had a stationary home again. What did she do with her stuff while she was on the road? Did she have any stuff? There is no record that she owned a gun. I suspect she owned a Bible.
I have a Bible but it's in storage with the rest of my stuff in CA.
So what's the point of this blog? Mainly, there's no point tonight. But I did succeed in getting myself to sit down in this mostly empty apartment and leave another post here. And that's good enough for today.