GLOBAL SADNESS FOR OUR UKRAINIAN NEIGHBORS

More sadness now, global and at the hands of Vladimir Putin.  It seems inappropriate to talk about all those lovely, simple, ordinary and mindful things we do each day to nurture ourselves and others, when Ukrainians are hiding in subway tunnels and lining up at checkpoints to enter neighboring countries as refugees. They are running for their lives.

I read Putin's speech justifying his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The transcript is online at Bloomberg.com and elsewhere.  It is a speech, as historians know far better than I, that echoes Hitler in the 1930s.  Analysts call Putin's speech "bizarre" and "irrational." He is a last-century man avenging a past that began with the fall of the USSR,  and creating a victimhood for his country beyond which he cannot see. The speech reflects a paranoid fear of the West and NATO.  The result in real terms, so far, is a powerful country crushing a smaller sovereign nation. People are dying. 

So much, this reminds me of the annexation of Austria by Germany on March 15, 1938, just this time of year. My mother was a historian who studied under Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg of Austria after his exile to America.  She talked often of those times.  President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine has refused offers of exile.  If the world needed a hero, this brave Ukrainian Jew is he.  

So, we will watch and pray and vote and some of us (younger and better than I) will be activists, while governments sanction and vigils are being held and protests against Putin's War all over the world, and in Russia as well.  And Ukrainians will defend their homes and cities.  And we will admit that there is evil in the world and that all is not well.  We don't know what is to come.

Dear God, help the world find peace.  In the name of the Gods of every nation, time and place.  Amen. 

 

  

 

 

WHEN WE ARE VULNERABLE WE ARE ALIVE

Since Valentine's Day was this month, I have been thinking about love, surely the most universal feeling of all.  I ran into an article by someone who wrote the following: 

The arrival of love is offered to me everyday, and everyday I have two choices.

To let love in and trust it just for this day, letting it wash over me in the gratitude that I get to feel it even for an hour.

To spend all hours of the day obsessing over if I can trust the love being offered; take out my detective notebook and look for all the holes in the story or where what is being promised didn’t line up with what happened before; and thereby block the love.

Have you ever done something like that?  If something bad has happened in the past, we may concentrate on that to the exclusion of the good that is right before our face.  That's blocking love.  It happens when we nurse a grudge, or are suspicious.  Or can't forgive.

If I have a memory or an intrusive thought, I might let it ruin (or try to) the happiness of the moment.  Sometimes I must actively remind myself:  Don't let this be hindered by something that is over. That is what I think the writer meant by not trusting the love being offered because "what is being promised didn't line up with what happened before."  

We all have our Worst Nightmares.  I don't mean "I'm not prepared," or "I'm naked."  (Apparently those are our top two.)  I mean those things that can explode under our nose or behind our back that we actually cannot prepare for, that we find out after they've happened.  Worst Nightmares almost always make us feel helpless and useless, or whatever other adjectives attach to feelings of worthlessness.  There's no preventing it because it already came true. Worst Nightmares can be traumatizing.

When we're faced with a Worst Nightmare we can let it consume our every waking thought or we can live our lives one day at a time, trusting that somewhere intimacy, joy, faith and trust will follow.  When we do that, we let love in. From other people, from God, from ourselves, from our partners and friends. We can either hear only the thoughts that paralyze us or listen to the love we are offered. The scariest and bravest thing we ever do is to love someone completely. Only when we are vulnerable are we alive. 

A 17th CENTURY POEM by Nina Naomi

 

 A darkness falls upon her breast.

Her memories hence reprise.

How sweet when vanished from her view.

they fill her soul with sighs.

That flesh she treasures silent kept.

"There's nothing there," once said.

But love is there and that's enough. 

inside Her pierced heart bled. 

no haven left, time's weight at risk. 

her mind askew, she's sure.

It was her keenest earthly woe,

Their faith to be impure. 

now turns from her with words unkind

And little knows her fears,

That their one life should rend in two.

swift leaves her to her tears. 

She cries in secret crouched and sore

Till she can cry no more.

then lo! her instinct leads her to

A brave determined shore. 

Unmixed with caution or with doubt,

she will confront the sin,

To tell it so that eyes can see

That they can new begin. 

they have and now the years have passed

And yet she makes this plea:

"When memories like deep waves persist,

Dear God from these save me!"   

by nina naomi  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IN THE DEEP MIDWINTER

 

In the deep midwinter, trees disrobe and views expand

From house to woods to meadow and back.

Cedars laden, tipped yellow-brown or berry-blue

Clustered, draw purple finch and mockingbird.

The gray squirrel too enjoys its feast. 

 

With woody branch and needles bluish-green,

Red cedars spread, heavy with the scent of pine.

I watch in my holly trees the robins tangle, 

Fluttering, swooping, eating, nesting.

Shiny green hollies, gleaming red berries, clear frost, the colors of winter.  

 

Over there the Lenten Rose in mauve or rich maroon or white.

Misty flowers, dark leaves splayed against the ground.

The downy woodpecker waits for seed.

Nearby the tufted titmouse with its touch of gold

Mingles its song with the nuthatch as the light hangs low. 

There's peace in midwinter but drama too, wild and windswept,

All out my window, all out my door. 

Bare trunks sculpted, jutting rocks and now rain, only rain. 

The creek rises to meet the lashings of water,

Gnarled roots criss-cross over the ground.

 

Deep down dampness, just a sliver of safety 

Behind these walls, the air cold and stark.

Later pale shadows, warm rays grace the forest.

Later still the winter moon sits high and lights the night

A deeper moonlit blue with stars so bright they look like ice.  

Beauty in bleakness, thrilling and sparse.

In chiseled shapes on wintry walks

Hushed by snow and silent lichen, or startled by geese at dusk.

While birds overwinter so do we,

Grateful anew for the wonders we see.          by Nina Naomi

SNEAK AWAY

It's winter at the beach, a wonderful time to sneak away and be here.  Mr. Wiggles is enjoying his pillows by the door, maybe remembering many years ago when he was a rescue dog in foster care here in Carteret County and I adopted him; a good day for both of us.  It's low tide and the waves are crashing far out, with rain falling and wind making every dog-walk an adventure.  If its too windy Wiggles has been known to tip over when he lifts his leg. The street is empty, not a single other renter or resident this cold February weekday. If you only come to the beach in the summer, try a February visit to the NC Crystal Coast. Or whatever coast is near you.  You may know the joys of winter beach walks already. 

The sun here sets over the Atlantic in winter because Pine Knoll Shores faces south off a jut of land.  Yesterday it was all oranges and yellows splayed across the horizon and upward into the sky.  But today there is no sun.  All is gray:  air, water, sand.  When visibility is low the ocean seems louder, nearer, like a phantasmic surprise rising out of the darkness, which is closing in as I write. 

Is there any time of year that doesn't have its own magic?  It's beautiful when the horizon disappears.  I can barely tell where water becomes sky.

So much of my life is not magical. It must be the same for you.  Work or lack of it, family concerns (shorthand for chronic fears about those we love), the daily news which, in all truth, is one depressing thing after another . . . . We deserve a break.  Not always possible, but if it is we need to grab the chance.  Our New Jersey family goes to visit the Florida family; that's smart.  But for me, I drive just 3 1/2 hours to the winter beach. What is near you?  Woods? Water? The excitement of a city? Now may not be the time, but if it is, what can you do, at home or away, to nourish yourself?  Thinking of all of us, Nina Naomi

THIS IS YOUR KINGDOM PAST AND PRESENT, CONTINUED

 Memorial for Peace and Justice

My Alabama kingdom didn't end in Birmingham.  I went on to Montgomery to see the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.  Just 93 miles but delays and traffic so heavy I almost turned back.  Such a mistake that would have been. 

My everyday kingdoms are Durham and such other every-day North Carolina towns as Pine Knoll Shores and Beaufort-by-the-Sea.    Certainly all three have a history both good and bad and a present both good and bad.  But the present is mostly good, I hope that is fair to say.  Now Montgomery is part of my kingdom because I will never forget what I saw. No one would.  

The Legacy Museum is on the site of a holding pen for enslaved people to be auctioned.  It traces the 200-year slave trade, both trans-Atlantic and domestic, up through the voter-suppression efforts of today.  More than 4,000 African-Americans are known to have been lynched between 1877 and 1950.  Some for refusing to run an errand for a white person, or asking a white woman for water, or rejecting the bid of a white person for cottonseed.  One Museum display is canister-jars of dirt taken from the site of each lynching that could be documented.  Dirt scrapped from under trees, from sites that family members remembered from generation to generation.  I thought about what that dirt held.  Blood,  tears, human tissue, sweat, trampling boot marks, or the bare foot prints of a man, woman or child.  
 

Legacy Museum

I looked for the counties in North Carolina.  I touched the jars.  I wished I could touch the dirt.  How important this preservation is.  Part of the world-wide theme of "Never Again."  How good to be part of that theme.  Although the museum holdings are horrifying, the remembering makes the Museum seem hopeful to me.  

The Memorial is a short drive away at the top of a hill.  Six acres of open air overlooking down-town Montgomery.  Set there in a beautiful spot for all of us to confront the past, bring our own hearts and minds to it, integrate it into our present and into the people we are today.  The centerpiece is 800 steel columns, each the size and shape of a coffin.  Each bears the name of an American county and the names and death dates of those killed there by violence.  When it rains the columns bleed red rust.  The display begins at eye level but the ground slopes downward so the columns rise until they are hanging like men lifted from the earth by a noose pulled tight.  

I thought about our time in Berlin at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.  Isabel Wilkerson's Caste (2020) documents how India's untouchables, the Jews during WWII, and Blacks (a term not used as a racial identifier in other countries) have been othered by the caste system. The sarcophagi in Berlin seemed endless. The ground also slopes, raising the monuments until the visitors themselves feel buried. 

Berlin, Germany

Montgomery has faced not only its own past but the past of the rest of the country.  The Memorial is for us all.  It makes things better when we  stand together as truth-tellers and try to make amends.  A reconciling action.  If you want to see this I hope you are able to.  Nina Naomi. 

 

THIS IS YOUR KINGDOM PAST AND PRESENT

Birmingham, Alabama

Sometimes our kingdom becomes so large that it is overwhelming.  That's how it felt when we visited Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama.  My husband was taking part in a small inter-racial conference on MLK's Letter from the Birmingham Jail, I the tag-along spouse. The first morning I visited some lovely areas of the city, one place actually called Old English Village, an area graced with what we call Southern charm, where I had a pub lunch.

The conference had booked us into Birmingham's historic Redmont Hotel.  The hotel opened in 1925 for whites only.  Both Jim Folsom and George Wallace, two segregationist governors, had their gubernatorial campaign sites there in the 40's, 50's and 60's. This is a city with a massive amount of on-going reckoning, a microcosm, it appears, of the country as a whole. 

l6th Street Baptist Church

 

The next day I toured the Civil Rights Institute, across the street from the 16th Street Baptist Church where on a Sunday morning in 1963 four well-known Klansmen planted nineteen sticks of dynamite and killed Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair, children robing for choir in the church basement. Their bodies were "thrown into the air like rag dolls" a survivor said.

 

Many of us have read The New Jim Crow by ACLU lawyer Michelle Alexander about the mass incarceration of Black people.  Or Caste by journalist Isabel Wilkerson; or The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist (a Durham local), about slavery as the foundation for American capitalism.  These books tell the story of our national sin.  

Also The Lynching by Laurence Leamer, which documents the 1981 death of 19-year-old Michael Donald by two young Klansmen looking for a Black man. When I read the book I thought how recent 1981 is for a lynching. I remember what I was doing then, a law student parenting my children.  To me the 80s are not history.  Yet is there any difference between that lynching and the death of Ahmaud Arbery (and so many others whose names we now know), murdered by three convicted white men for jogging in a white neighborhood?  So much violence and sorrow in this history. Anything I might say is an understatement and from one who by definition has inadequate comprehension.

The Civil Rights Institute I was visiting concerns the social history of our country, the context of the Birmingham protests, the Jim Crow era, the Freedom Riders from the North, the Montgomery bus boycott, the fear, the bravery, the hubris and the inhumanity.  If you can't visit it's worth reading about, even just in TripAdvisor strangely enough.  A woman from North Carolina called her visit "life changing." Another visitor wrote, "No it's not about politics.  It's about human rights."  Someone else said, "It makes you think and hurt."  We can appreciate people from all over the world taking time to record their reactions to something so important.  

The day I was there two young African-American boys were talking with each other about each exhibit.  They gestured and spoke as if they were tour-guides in training.  As it turned out, that is exactly what they were.  There were assigned to be the tour guides for their classes.  One looked about 13, the other about 11.  A few of us joined their practice-tour.  At one point the younger boy was explaining the Freedom Rides.  He reached out and touched me to get my attention.  "On those rides," he said, "you and I" gesturing to me than to himself, "could sit together."  That seemed profound to me; it does still.  His touch was something special, a gift.  Such a young boy to understand the sins of the past and to welcome me into his present.  The children seemed empowered by what they were doing.

So my kingdom got larger and more complicated on this trip.  All of our kingdoms have a history, a past and a present.  I am grateful for this chance to focus on part of mine.  I pray for a listening heart, an open mind, a more humble attitude, the power to help, and for my comprehension to become less limited day by day. 

 Nina Naomi  

 

THIS IS YOUR KINGDOM

"This is your Kingdom" is an online United Kingdom travel guide that handpicks contributors to write about their favorite places--picture-perfect villages, foodie towns, unspoiled hamlets, rivers and streams.  Since our daughter was born at the Royal Free Hospital and we lived in London for 3 years, I have enjoyed every UK adventure we can manage, armchair included.  Travel is one of the things many of us have been yearning for.

Bunhill Fields, London

Although we don't have kings in America, I love the idea of thinking of our country as our Kingdom, filled with magical forests, mountains, lakes and other places that spark our imaginations. Our Kingdom has the views we miss when we are away, the people we know, the places we haunt and for many, the language we speak.    

Another UK source, The Simple Things magazine, includes a monthly feature where someone in love with their city--from anywhere in the world-- takes the reader on a tour.  This always makes me think about where I live.  Not Copenhagen or Lisbon or any well-known city at all, but Durham, North Carolina, a diverse, blue-collar university town in the rolling wooded hills of the Piedmont, halfway between the mountains and the sea.

The monthly feature in The Simple Things is set up as a Q & A that reveals the hidden gems of a city.  I can't say Durham's gems are all that hidden, but here's my Q & A. I hope it triggers thoughts about your own kingdom, or makes you want to visit mine.  

Q  What's the best winter-time activity in Durham?  
A   Duke Basketball!  Duke University is home to the winningest basketball coach in NCAA history, Coach Mike Krzyzewski (Coach K) with over 1000 wins at Duke and 5 National Championships. That is our winter time activity--college basketball.  Tonight is our 2022 big rivalry away game down the road in Chapel Hill.

National Anthem, Duke-Carolina Game

Duke also has wonderful gardens and a beautiful Gothic Chapel where the 50-bell carillon plays at 5 p.m. each day.  Who would expect a Gothic enclave in a Southern town in North Carolina? 

Duke Chapel

Q  What are the people like? 
A  We're diverse. That's our pride. Our nearest elementary school has students from 80 countries. Multi-cultural night is an adventure.  Native costumes and dances, food trucks from everywhere. 

Q  What's the best place for a night out?
A   There are so many.  One of our favorites is the top of the Durham Hotel, a contemporary renovation of a former mid-century modern bank building.  The views from the rooftop raw bar are spectacular. 

Sunset from Top of the Durham

Q Has Durham's history been preserved? 
A  Yes!  Brightleaf Square, West Village . . . all of our tobacco buildings from the last century have been renovated for multi-use--condos, restaurants, shops.  The American Tobacco Campus lights the old Luck Strike Tower at Christmas.  It's a great place to hang out year round.  DPAC (Durham Performing Arts Center) is a world-class venue.  We saw Jerry Seinfeld there, Phantom, took the children to Radio City Rockettes. . . .

Lucky Strike Tower

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This barely touches the treasures in my town.  There's the Eno River state park, the historical Black Wall Street area, the Museum of Life and Science, the Nasher Art Museum. . . .  Isn't it nice when we love where we live? When we feel like our home, our city or town, our special beach, our hang-out spots, the park our dog loves, the rivers we rock-hop on, the stars we see from our front yard--all these are our Kingdom? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHAT IF . . .

What if I go outside and look for the moon every single night?  Cold, rainy, mild, warm, bright or hazy I raise my eyes and search out the beautiful luminous goddess of the sky.   What if I pause and reset, breathing in the freshness of the night air, thinking about time and distance and how many souls are entranced by the same bright orb?  Wouldn't that magic then settle behind my eyes and infuse my sleep?  I think it would.  

What if I do my best and never criticize the result?  Or even if it is day where my best is not possible,  where I'm a little tired or holding my heart tenderly for some good reason, that I still don't chastise myself but say, "Well, dear, this is your best today."  What if you do the same?   What if we always give ourselves the benefit of the doubt?

What if I spend my free moments journalling or crafting or reading instead of editing my NETFLIX  watch list?  Or trapped by the mesmerizing backlight of my phone?  What if I read before bed every night? That never leaves me unrewarded and numb.  What if we each pick our favorite things--artful or banal, easy or hard,  completely without judgment except that they take us out of ourselves--and do them regularly, keeping the time sacred?  

What if I'm not ashamed of the things I can't control?  Not ashamed of my aging self (shape, gait, weight), not ashamed of no longer working.  But instead, love that I have time to garden, blog, nurture grandchildren, take long baths and even nap.  How long didn't I wish for more hours to myself?  Some doors need to be closed and the pathology of busyness is one, no matter how young or old we are.   As we age we become more inspired, more creative, more accepting and less fearful . . . go ahead and finish the list.   

What if we don't whittle our leisure time away but rather look for richer experiences?  Ones that don't involve clicking and digital distraction.  Nothing is more invigorating that being outdoors whatever the season.  Now it's bundling up and tromping in snow.  I love gathering wood for my log rack.  My husband walks trails.  There's skating and skiing and sledding (and shoveling).  Time with a child is always time well spent; maybe only the grandparent generation realizes this, but it's true.  

These are my what-ifs for February, a kind of time-out for intentions that lead to a better life.  Nothing empty, overwhelming or exhausting.  Tonight I'm starting with the moon; I'll linger when I take Mr. Wiggles out for his last break before bed.  Just a few hours from now.  It will be cold and clear, a lovely North Carolina winter night.  What are you choosing for your reset?      In peace, Nina Naomi