Some Thoughts on Land

–I believe that the land has a spirit, or spirits, or a soul or souls of sorts.  What I believe is that the land has luck, fortune, built up over time and passed along to the people and things on it.  You can work with the land on a physical level and work with the Luck of a place on that level.

For me, it’s easier to get a sense of the spirit of a rural place, to sit out in it and feel what kind of Luck it has to offer.

Buildings, too, have a kind of spirit.

I suppose, too, that cities must have a spirit, but it’s hard for me to pick up on it.  I’m just not keyed in that way, though, I suppose if I was, I wouldn’t find it so hard to have an office with no window.

–We clearly carry with us the idea that things have souls, even though we’ve been Christian now for so long.  We, meaning we white people who work so hard to put our god in Heaven and our spirits all safely tucked in there with Him.  But we tell ourselves plenty of stories of cursed things–like the Hope Diamond–and haunted things–like houses and battlefields.  We remember what we’ve forgotten.

–We also still carry with us the knowledge that a person is animated by the land they are connected to.  Look at how we tell stories about vampires needing to sleep in the dirt of their homeland.  At some level, we know that a person’s animating principle is tied to the animating principle of the land.

–This is, then, another way our ancestors are walking the hedge–both us and not us; both dead & in the ground and coursing through our veins, revealing themselves in the shape and contours of our bodies; both human and dirt; family and graveyard dust; not here and always with us–constantly straddling the boundaries between This and That, Home and The Wild.

–Some folks think that we’re all on Different Paths to the same End, that we’re all worshipping the same God under different names.  This is called Universalism, though Universalism also has other definitions.  I don’t believe that there’s just one god.  I don’t believe in one universal Truth we’re all seeking from different angles.

–I do, however, pay attention to similar beliefs held by widely different people.  I believe it’s important that so many people who travel between here and There picture themselves going up a pole or a tree to do it, or, in return, picture the ancestors and the gods coming down a pole or tree to get to us.  I think we can say that, if so many people have come to the conclusion that it’s that kind of motion that takes you across, it’s that kind of motion that can take you across.

–And I believe there’s an important truth in the reverence we pay to the land where our ancestors rest.  We, living people, are the breaking wave of a vast ocean.  We crash on dry land and rejoin the rest of the water.  We are the thin embodied edge of a vast unembodied community.

–Cutting people off from their land is a genocidal tactic.  Cutting people off from their ancestors is a genocidal tactic.  There is no way around it.  And we know this, even as we la la la our way into convincing ourselves that we’ve forgotten it.

–And it’s bad Luck.  It’s terrible mis-Fortune.  How can you tend to that kind of luck and not have long repercussions?

—Lisa Aldred says

Although these theorists elucidate the exoticization of the Other in the abstract, why are certain New Agers obsessed specifically with Native Americans and their spirituality in particular? What is it about Native American spiritual beliefs and practices that hold such a fascination for a certain sector of the New Age? There has been a long history of obsession in this society with images of Native Americans. These images have served as Rorschach blots onto which prevailing sentiments, anxieties, and political moods have been projected. The images of Native Americans have changed with the times and in response to historical events and attitudes, but these images have always reflected more about non-Natives’ desires than Native Americans’ lives or cultures. Lakota scholar and activist Vine Deloria Jr. sheds insight into these projections in his article “Pretend Indians.”

Indians, the original possessors of the land, seem to haunt the collective unconscious of the white man and to the degree that one can identify the conflicting images of the Indian which stalk the white man’s waking perception of the world one can outline the deeper problems of identity and alienation that trouble him. A review of the various images and interpretations of the Indian, therefore, will give us a fairly accurate map of the fragmented personality that possesses the American white man. One can start at almost any point and list the collective attributes, attitudes, and beliefs about the Indian and then strip away the external image to reveal the psyche of the American white.

I bring this up for two reasons.  One, because I think it’s important to remember when anybody talks about the spirituality of a group they aren’t a part of, that they can draw conclusions that aren’t there to be drawn, even me.

And two, if Aldred is right, what do our actions towards Native Americans say about us?  How cut off from the community of our ancestors are we?  How alienated from our own land?  How inconsequential do we feel ourselves to be?

[h/t bfp]

Google Reader has quite the sense of humor

Redneck Mother reports on a city official who doesn’t want bars in his town because they might bring TEH GAY.

Next entry in my feed: Scientist report that alcohol makes fruit flies gay.

Hey, Go Be Famous!

Or anonymously famous.  Jennifer is wondering if she can include some of our stories in a book she’s writing about women and math.  It’s publishing, so there’s no money in it (unless she completely lucks out, in which case, we can all sit around sneering about how she’d have been nothing, NOTHING without us), but money’s not everything.

Weird & Interesting

I have been weird my whole life, but in an Addams Family/Munsters way, where I go about my life feeling rather ordinary and doing the ordinary things I do, only to have people feel the need to repeatedly tell me that I’m weird.  I’m never sure what, exactly, they think is so weird about me, but there it is.

Plimco has been “interesting” lately.

“You’re just so INTERESTING, Celia. Wow, you really are INTERESTING, aren’t you? MY my, what an INTERESTING person you are.” And they say it like it’s a compliment or something. No shit. I’m interesting. I know I’m interesting, I don’t need you to tell me that.

“Interesting,” to me, sounds very similar to “weird.” I guess it’s supposed to be complimentary, but, when it’s the default of how you are–just that way–it doesn’t really feel so much like a good thing to be called.

Gone to the Dogs

First, go over and support the Stewman, who is fighting cancer without the aid of health insurance.  Yeah, if that don’t scare the shit out of you, nothing will.

Second, Smiley got another dog!  Which he is trying to name.  I believe our efforts to help him name his first dog were roundly ignored, but we should still go and offer up suggestions.  Sadly, my vote for “Robert Plant” is not winning fans.  But, I tell you, I’d be sorely tempted to name that dog Robert Plant if he were mine.  I would almost buy a dog just to name it Robert Plant.  I’d love to go to the park and yell, “Hey, Robert Plant, come here!  Robert Plant, leave that poor girl alone.  Robert Plant, what are you eating?  Ooo, good pooping, Robert Plant!  Robert Plant, go lay down!”

See?  Good times.

Third, Mack took the cutest picture of his dog, which I would gladly link to, if he put it up on his blog.  How cute is it?  Cute Overload-worthy cute.  And, the best part is, pictures of Mack’s dog give you all the cuteness of it with none of the rancid farts.

Song of America

I’ve got “Song of America” on my iPod, which I am both really enjoying and kind of frustrated with.  On the one hand, I want to be introduced to songs I’m not familiar with when I listen to something like this.  On the other hand, there are songs I just would expect to hear, no matter how often covered, like “We Shall Overcome,” which is strangely absent.  Also, it seems like, if you were going to pick a Springsteen song to have on this album, you’d have “Born in the U.S.A.” and not “Streets of Philadelphia.”

I guess what’s unclear to me from listening to it is whether it’s a collection of songs about America, songs that tell a story about America, or just important American songs.  All three things are stlightly different.

I would recommend it.  As already noted, I’m madly in love with BR549’s “Sweet Betsy from Pike.”  And I love “That Great Atomic Power,” and I’m not just saying that because Sista Smiff is carrying on with one of the guys on that track.  I hadn’t ever heard the song “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” before (although looking at the number of folks who’ve covered the song of whom I’m a fan, I’m kind of shocked that it’s slipped by me until now) and, shoot, that will rip your heart out.

But there are some glaring omissions.  I’m not sure how you include “This Land is Your Land” without including “God Bless America.”

And so, it makes me think, if I were going to try a project like this, what songs would I want to be sure were on it?  But I can’t come up with a good answer, because I can’t decide what kind of album I’d want to result.  Is it just a collection of songs about America or is it a collection of songs that tell you something about America?  And what, exactly, would that something be?

And would that be different than a project that featured the songs that Americans regularly listened to?  Because that seems to me that it would be.  But I’d also be fascinated by that–a big box set that carried you through the songs that were important to Americans at different times in our history.

Hmm.