Our task is Gargantuan.
gar·gan·tuan
Function: adjective
Usage: often capitalized
Definition: GIGANTIC, COLOSSAL: of tremendous size or volume
Oftentimes, a woman's dream is so Gargantuan, she can't possibly achieve it alone.
The question before women today: Can our lives, thoughts, and actions become the stepping stones for the agile Goddess of Peace to recreate the universe in Her image?
Peace is designed. It is not a given. Women know this. It is our life's work. Peace springs from our desire for union with something greater than ourselves. War, on the other hand, is a given.
Today, a war still rages in Iraq. We don't need to debate it for a nanosecond. We need to admit the truth. This is a wholly unnecessary and poorly waged war that was started by the reactionary President of a wounded nation. The first thing we must do is forgive ourselves. When the war began, the American psyche was shattered. We were incapable of the good sense required to stop our government from starting the war. Our grief was gargantuan. But even now, the Bush administration seems incapable of seeing or telling the truth. They act as if our occupation of Iraq is a worthy endeavor. I'd like to think our cause is noble, but as the number of Iraqi civilian casualties approaches 25,000, the insanity of our continued occupation becomes obvious.
History often gets written out of ignorance, fear, sorrow, and madness. Perhaps it takes a certain amount of healing before peace can be written into history. Since 9/11, we've had time to know misfortune. To weep our healing tears. To recast our values within a global perspective. And to imagine peace. I've been to Ground Zero. The scene of that great crime is hallowed ground. Now, it's time to design a long-lasting and fruitful peace.
World leaders often speak about the so-called Good and so-called Evil forces at work in the world instead of pulling out the magnifying glass to search for the varied truths about our human situation on this shared planet. We need to ponder our place in the Great Scheme. We can no longer let our misguided leaders continue to make colossal mistakes on our behalf. We cannot let the world be managed by those who have been conditioned to wage war as a first option. We must always seek the truth and build on it, rather than stirring up well-worn, poorly told lies.
Today, President Bush departed our nation's capitol for the G8 conference to be held In Gleneagles, Scotland, where he will join the leaders of Britain, Russia, France, Germany, Canada, Italy and Japan. According to those who have golfed at Gleneagles, every hole is a world unto itself! What more appropriate setting is there for eight testosterone-fueled humans to congregate to discuss the issues of our times? May Africa and Mother Earth be blessed at this summit.
Very very soon, we have to throw some estrogen into the power mix.
Here's today's poem:
HEAVEN OR EARTH
Wasn’t it Elizabeth Barrett Browning
who swore that
Earth was crammed with Heaven?
Oh, but what did she mean?
For me, until this moment,
Earth has been a mere resting place,
a place to catch my breath,
expand my lungs
and scream scream scream
at the beauty,
the horror,
and the necessity of silence.
But now it’s time to raise our voices,
claim the blessed Earth,
and heal our wounds,
self-inflicted and otherwise.
Book recommendation: The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, a spiritual memoir by Sue Monk Kidd. The book helped me realize how deeply imbedded the masculine concept of God is in our society and how disastrous it is to the planet and to our feminine well-being.
Affirmation: I gladly accept all the feminine powers of the universe and act in harmony with my earthly sisters.
posted by Karon Luddy @ 3:00 PM
4 Comments:
Terry,
I have asked my first year students to respond to your posting!
This should be interesting. They're a bunch of geniuses.
To my English 1101 Students
My goal is to expose you to multiple perspectives, such as the comments of my friend Terry Frazier, who also happens to be a screenwriter, a Vietnam veteran, and a former English professor with lots of experience teaching first-year writing students.
The diverse nature of the responses to this blog is an excellent example of William Perry’s Theory of Cognitive Development, which is widely used for college-aged students: (This text is paraphrased, condensed, and excerpted from the UNCC Writing Faculty Handbook: copyright 2003)
I covered this theory with the 8:00 o’clock class on Friday, but have not covered it with the 1:00 class.
Please familiarize yourself Perry’s Four Stages for in-class discussion as well as blog responses.
Stage One: "DUALISM"
Students typically see the world in either/or terms, black and white with no in between. Students are able to learn basic facts and concepts. They can compare and contrast and explain their answers.
Stage Two: “MULTIPLICITY”
Here, students realize that there are multiple ways of understanding, but they believe that all avenues of thinking lead to the ONE TRUE ANSWER. At this point, students can compare and contrast ideas, identify multiple perspectives, and complete basic analytical tasks. It is still difficult for students to understand that they must support their ideas with evidence.
Stage Three: “RELATIVISM”
During this phase, a student's perception of right and wrong shifts. Students begin to understand that most questions cannot be answered with ANY DEGREE OF CERTAINTY; at this point, they tend to believe that all ideas are equally legitimate.
Stage Four: “COMMITMENT”
Here, students form an allegiance with a particular point of view. They become reflective and are able to experience and explore the impact of their ideas IN RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER IDEAS. They are also able to modify their commitments based on the hindsight of experience.
This development is a long process. I do not expect you to advance through these stages in a semester or even four years. My role is to help you understand what is involved in NAVIGATING THIS WORTHWHILE JOURNEY.
THIS STORY HAS LEGS OF ITS OWN
I am deeply honored that Terry's Vietnam story is making its literary debut on this blog.
In his excellent book, THE COURAGE TO WRITE, Ralph Keyes says: "In the long run, learning techniques does far less to improve our writing than finding the WILL, the NERVE, the GUTS to put on paper what we really want to say."
Terry's brave words are engraved on the hearts and minds of all of us in Engish 1101 Sections 01 & 027. Students are intrigued and their responses have been thoughtful and reflective.
I agree with David's comment that "there should be some board with nothing but a 100 Terry's serving on it" to help us decide whether to go to war or not. But the irony is that there is only ONE Terry Frazier. That is the beauty of being a human being. We are free to become uniquely ourselves over and over and over. And to write about it!
Octavia Paz said that poets and readers are two moments of a single clarity. One of the reasons I love to read and write is because of this ETERNAL CONNECTION between writer and reader. Even if the writer and reader are separated by centuries or countries, they always meet in a context of NOW. The writer writes the words at a particular moment in time. The reader reads the words at a particular moment in time. This writer-reader connection becomes an event unto itself, situated in the eternal now. And the beauty is that the moment we share can never "unhappen."
How lucky we are to meet here!
It's Friday morning, I'm sitting the Crowne Hotel Lobby in Asheville, NC reading away. Thank God for wireless.
I think Hanna is absolutely right about how you cannot make someone connect the dots of their life, and that when you do connect a dot or two it is a revelatory event. I was just thinking of this yesterday —about how TIMING is everything, and that you can't force anyone elses' timing.
I certainly don't want students to get out a magnifiying glass and examine their whole life story.
Rather I want them to shine a light on one particular moment, one particular relationship or a particular pattern in their life to reflect on what led them to their RESPONSE. (The relationship that's the most important of course is the relationship with oneself.)
Regarding the upcoming essay, my goal is to give students an opportunity to evaluate an opinion, a judgement they've made about themselves or their future, and help them connect the dots to how they might have arrived at that particular belief to determine if it's what they truly believe or truly want for themselves.
Connecting the dots is one of the main disciplines I use as a writer. And mainly that's what I've done every day on a daily basis for about eight years. Connecting the dots. It's a consciousness game I play all the time. I've done it so much; it's grooved into my neural network. And when I'm not even conscious of it, my brain is playing the connecting the dots game. When it comes across a big juicy dot, it draws my attention to it and I have an AHA moment.
Indeed it is not an analytical exercise. It's a spiritual discipline as much as anything else. It's how I've learned to see the patterns of my life. To see my automatic reactions. My conditioned responses that keep me acting out old behaviors that keep me from growing, from becoming the next Karon.
As I wrote in my literacy essay:
"Writing has helped me become a more decent person that I would have been otherwise. It has helped me separate who I really am from my ego. Alan Watts once asked a question that goes something like this: Wouldn’t the world be a marvelous place if we treated our egos as the useful fictions they are? Yes, Alan, it would indeed be marvelous. And for me, that’s what writing does: it continually reminds me that the "I" named Karon Luddy made up the story I tell myself about who I am—and that I might want to consider making some revisions to this obnoxious "I" thing.
Blog, blog, blog!
Thanks Terry for sharing Part 10 of your story.
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