Waiting in the garden for lightning

Posted on August 10, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

I sit in my garden at 1:30 am waiting for an epiphany,
longing, Saul on the road to Damascus, to be relieved.

Even though I don’t believe salvation comes through lightning,
I long for quick and fast.

I believe salvation comes through knowing and accepting,
though I do not know of what or how.

Not tonight but the night before I met a man
who has lived twenty-five years under a large tree in India
where there is snow and a trail to Tibet
where Chinese soldiers have orders to shoot you on sight.

The trail, narrow as a snake, winds along the side of mountains.

The Chinese soldier who saw him, wearing no shoes,
asked his blessing and gave him his combat boots.

He lives off wild strawberries that look like raspberries –
I saw a photo on his friend’s cell phone – and a kind of wild spinach.

And mushrooms that grow only after lightning strikes the ground.

I wait for an epiphany.

In a US city he wear shoes, soft sportive clothes, and a white newsboy hat.
He smiles without end, and seldom speaks.

He glows as someone might who eats mushrooms that grow after lightning strikes.

I wait in my garden with my dog, discomforted.

Three days ago I had lunch with a rare beauty in her early 70s,
enthralled by a rocker, singer-songwriter – enthralled!

They whirl and dance, enchantress and enchanter.
He has wings tattooed on his back.

She calls him panther, he calls her slow burn.
She is famous, on the cover of a magazine right now,
wearing a hat made of a nest with golden eggs.

She writes of their sex life, real and imagined –
she will create a perfume for them and the book.

The perfume will be named “text.” He is 37.

She removed her large black straw hat and blue sunglasses
under the mottling trees. Our lunch was salmon with avocado
and chia seed pudding with raspberries.

I had not seen her in over a year.

“You have ‘Z’ on your forehead.”

“Yes,” she said, “it is a tattoo.”

“You have been struck by lightning.”

Two night ago, I saw my own young lover after months of parting.
He told me he missed me, us, talking, being.

That was not an epiphany, except in being stated.
It was getting things good and right.

He will help “Z” find a perfumery.
Perhaps we will create our own perfume,
something for what we cannot have.

I wait, in the garden, discomforted, for lightning – and rain.

I look to a man who lives under a tree
and a woman who loves madly
and a librettist who may make an opera of a play I wrote
and a once lover who will be a friend forever
and a widower who flees grief, likes bullfights, and touches my heart
and a phalanx of delicate and mighty women who fight demons with me –
and a singer-songwriter (not hers, but mine) who breaks through reasonable living
by the ruckus of his untamed genius.

These people and more sit with me as I sit in the dark,
knowing there is no lightning of reprieve,
understanding, or accepting of what has happened
to the others now with us –

children beheaded in Iraq,
people turned into body parts in Gaza,
the dead from plague in West Africa.

Numbers beyond immensity dead in Syria.

And this is the crux:

How do we dance on the head of the pin during slaughter?
How do we create perfume?
How do we eat chia seeds with raspberry topping?

I cannot put their suffering in a drawer
for after my vacation or rendezvous or lunch.

Symphony of friends and lovers – simplest of lives,
most stylish of lives – lift me lift me lift me.

I am split between ecstasy and pain.

Did lightning already strike? Was I torn apart silently?

A rabbit, a first, just hopped across the end of my garden
– not poetic license. It is a city garden, it is 2:00 am.

Two of us awake in this strange land,
searching for a kind of wild spinach or berry,
or mushroom that grows only after lightning strikes.

Slaughter, beauty, art, and obligation

Posted on August 4, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

In the fall of 1950 I arrived to school upset and angry. My parents had not told me we were at war and had been for months. They had treated me like a child, not bothering to tell me the horrendous news of people killing each other. What could possibly be larger or worse than war? How dare they.

I went immediately to the cloakroom where I asked Rosie, Jerry, David, and Tony if they knew we were at war. They did not. I told them it was with Korea, around the world.

Jerry said, “I’m going to be a soldier and I’ll fight and I’ll kill all the bad men.” He was punching his fists in the air. At that moment I realized he was a little boy with no understanding of what war was, that he didn’t even understand what death was. Existential isolation first hit me in the cloakroom of the second grade.

This memory has returned as people kill each other and allow others to kill. We in the U.S. blithely supply weapons for the killing. Death tolls are rounded to the nearest hundred or thousand and the accounting cannot keep up with reality.

But I am not feeling existential isolation. I, like most of us, feel the suffering that permeates our existential commonality. We live together in a world of blood, screams, decimation, death by weapons, hubris, callousness, arrogant self-justification, death close up, death by remote control, convenient self-delusion, and men who fight wars as though they were video games.*

We look for ways to cope, to put slaughter into a context that gives a modicum of relief. We protest, we give money, we write legislators, and we bombard Facebook. We use activism as an antidote to despair.* (I receive more or less 30 posts, videos, photos from Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel each day.)

This onslaught has brought me to a rare place – writer’s block – something I have seldom if ever experienced. This is my sixth attempt to write in over a week. The block does not come from nothing to say, but from too much to say, and that many brilliant writers and analysts are saying it far better than I could.

So what is my part? I cannot bear not helping, but what have I uniquely to give? And if I have nothing uniquely to add, should I simply wait, breath, cry, and pray in the quiet breathing sort of way that I do? It seems impossible to write blogs that are simply amusing.

An answer of sorts has come – a work in progress certainly – that I have only the personal to give. This feels, in one way, like a travesty, an indulgence, an eating of a fruit tart on the edge of a room with body parts in the middle. Do we eat it looking to the floor, to the corner, or to the middle?

Do I exaggerate? No, it feels that strange.

Am I too in-your-face? Perhaps, but at least I am writing again.

And what grants this writing is that I know I am not alone in the agitated distress of those of us who are witnesses. Because we care, we, too, are injured. We hurt.

I have come to that among the things we can do – in addition to protesting, giving money, writing, and other forms of activism – is to remember, even latch onto, beauty and to fiercely participate in creations that transcend devastation.

To state: This is not a time to shop – an obscenity coming out of materialistic responses to slaughter – but a time to embrace, rediscover, and express our creative “better angels” in order to heal and strengthen ourselves and to hold possibility for those who suffer. This is not a time to whimper.

If humans are both savage and divine, we must “activate” our impulses to create harmony and embrace light. We must not be afraid of the startling and cleansing power of light (ours from inside and that that feels as though it comes from outside of ourselves), and we must not feel it is shallow of us to create art or go to a concert when our friends are being killed. Our job is remain conscious of the suffering of others as we tether that suffering to creations offered to us by others or from us to others.

This is a time to write poetry, to create songs, and to paint. This is a time to listen to poetry, to listen to music, to go to galleries. It is a time to make delicate meals, create labyrinths for your children, carry and distribute chocolates, look deeply into flowers, and to dance. These actions may lift us into tears or laughter, but they will help us heal and they will spread. This, in the hands of a master, produces Guernica. This, in the hands of the rest of us, is a power that can change the world.

My grandson told me that humans are the weirdest animals because we talk and we create things. He turned seven two days ago, he is the age Jerry was when he going to kill the bad men. He is smarter than Jerry was, but I do not want him to know people are killing other people. I, like my parents, like all parents, want to protect the children.

Ah, the children. Ah, the children.

We are savages and we allow savagery, but we are also the vessels that divinity has to work with to bring joy and peace.

An Israeli on my Facebook, one of numerous new “friends,” occasionally posts a photo of an Israeli being arrested for protesting against the destruction of Gaza, but more often he posts incongruent beauty – a curve of a violin, a song, the inlaid decoration of a harpsichord. I have come to understand why. Each posting is a candle of beauty that has been, beauty that is, and beauty that will be.

To “never forget” horror is one thing, but to “always remember” our divinity – our better angels – is imperative. It is the stuff of personal and global salvation. We must take it out of the realm of possibility and into the world of reality. We must create beauty, harmony, acknowledgment, love, and forgiveness that can be touched, felt, heard, and seen. We must remind ourselves and others that transcending is something people do. It came in our package. We weirdest of animals can re-create the world for the better.

________

* “men playing video games” and “activism as antidote” are credited to Jean Shinoda Bolen, MD, author, and Jungian analyst, who called during the writing of this post.

. . . then someone took my balloons

Posted on July 21, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

Approximately 12:15 pm yesterday I locked my Lexus hybrid in the underground parking garage of the Giant food store at Van Ness center in Washington, DC. I then opened the trunk with the “power door” button on my key to get my recycle bags, remembered I didn’t need them, and closed the door. After all, I was only getting helium balloons for my grandson’s 7^th birthday party today. My daughter said this was the place.

She was right. The balloon selection, immediately inside the door, was great. I bought five in solid colors – red, blue, orange, purple, yellow – with large white polka dots and the words “Happy Birthday” on them. I also bought two large metallic balloons in multi-colors, one of which was 3’ long and shaped like a trumpet.

I went directly to the checkout counter and back to my car. This is where the trouble began. My keys were not in my small purse. The car was locked with my smartphone sitting on the passenger’s seat.

I tied the balloons to my car door and retraced my steps to search where I’d been – with two clerks, the checkout person, and a couple customers. Then I went to the “Solution” counter, i.e. customer service. By the end of the day I made four more trips to that counter to see if keys – a large clump of keys – had been turned in.

The first taxi driver

Around 1:15 I hailed a taxi to take me home to get my emergency key – a flat key that snaps into a plastic form about the thickness of three credit cards. I had had this key for five years without needing it.

It was the worst taxi ever. Filthy and smelly with a 5”-wide swatch of exposed electrical wires at my feet, banana peels between the front seats (amidst who knows what else), no a.c., and the little passenger television that has continuous loops of inane quizzes with plastic-looking t.v. hosts was on full blast. I interrupted the driver who was doing his own loud unending loop into his ear phone to turn it off or down. He said it was broken and could not be turned down or off. I told myself this is heaven compared to Gaza.

Once home I got my emergency key and we returned to the car. (I would have taken another taxi except there are no taxis right where I live.)

Back to the car

The emergency key did not work. Even though it was labeled with my name, it belonged to a Lexus I sold five years before. Presumably the owners have the emergency key I needed.

I went outside to catch a second taxi to take me home again to find a spare key that I have been vaguely aware that I hadn’t seen in a few weeks, but it had to be somewhere, right?

Arjuna, or the second taxi driver

Arjuna drove the second taxi. Arjuna, named I presume after the converser with Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, was my angel. His cab was spotless, air conditioned, and we said “How are you?” at the same moment and laughed. This, I thought, is the opposite of Gaza.

Arjuna also had surround sound phone speakers that I ended up using a lot. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

Arjuna started praying for me that I would find my spare “regular” key. I ran into the house and went through every little box and pencil cup I had, plus several purses. His prayers were not enough. There was no key.

I sat in front of my house in Arjuna’s cool crisp taxi and tried to collect myself. The numbers of the people I needed to call were, of course, in the memory of my iphone locked inside my car.

But, smarty under stress that I am, I remembered my daughter’s number and called her on skype from my ipad. No answer. She was at her aerial class. My daughter does acrobatics while hanging from large ribbons. I texted my plight. She texted back with the 800 telephone number of the “help me whenever wherever” desk at Lexus, and Arjuna called them on his surround sound phone. So nice.

The “help me whenever wherever” desk couldn’t locate me or my car – common name, various moves, no vin number – but let me know that my regular roadside assistance with them would have expired after four years.

Arjuna dialed my friend Mike for me (number supplied by my daughter down once again from the ribbons), who called Tony my accountant and then called me back. No, I did not have roadside assistance coverage with my car insurer.

Arjuna drove me back to my car and assured me that God was watching out for me: “Think of all the real suffering in the world. This is just a bad day.”

He then called two locksmiths to compare prices. Who knew that locksmith companies use the same free-roaming people to unlock locks? They network, and they get angry if you call more than one place. They call you and ask “How many locksmiths did you call?” and if you don’t give the right answer, i.e.“Only one other and I want you, and you alone” they hang up on you in surround sound.

Yvan drove up around 4:30. Arjuna handed me off to him with tenderness and care.

Yvan, the locksmith

I jumped in the passenger seat of Yvan’s van with “Locksmith” written on the side and we turned into the parking garage. First step: push the button to get the ticket that will lift the arm so you can enter. Instead Yvan turned to me and said, as closely as I remember: “Hello, I’m Yvan, I’m Israeli, we’re not going to pay this.” He argued with the man in the cubicle but eventually took a ticket.

His next words to me were “What do you do?”

I felt myself flinch slightly and edge to the door, “I started a peace organization.”

Yvan: Oh, so we’re on different sides. . . . he smiled.

(How, how, how is this happening?)

Me: I don’t know.

Yvan, as we turned the first corner going down: Are you Jewish?

Me: No, but I marry Jewish.

Yvan: You marry Jews?

Me: Yes. My car is over there.The one with the balloons tied to the door.

At the point where Yvan set off the car alarm in the unsuccessful attempt to open the driver’s door, he shouted, “This is nothing compared with the noise in Israel right now.”

(I tell myself I will say nothing about Gaza until he gets my car unlocked.)

Me: I guess not.

Yvan: I was in the Israeli military for three years.

Me: Oh. (Anyone with experience with the Israeli military would already know this – the shaved head, posture, health, and strength. It’s a look. The abruptness. It’s a style.)

Yvan – Hebrew for “John” – did get the passenger door open. I retrieved my phone, which had 12% battery on it. There were, as I was 95% certain, no keys in the car.

Yvan was about to leave me standing, after I paid an exorbitant amount, by my dead car with the passenger door open (he said if we shut it, it would lock again) when he said, “Where do you want to go?”

Me: I don’t know. I need a moment to think.

He looked closer at me: I don’t have any other jobs in line, I could take you home.

Me: Oh, so now you’re the nice Jew? (Yes, I really said that.)

He laughed. He took me home, though not without arguing with the man in the cubicle and somehow distracting him on a related subject, and when we drove out without paying he said – I swear – it works if you just distract them.

Yvan called towing services. The first company hung up because he wouldn’t tell them what kind of car I had on the theory that they would charge more for a Lexus. With the second company he told them it was a Toyota. They said they would be there in an hour.

One hour gave me time to get home, get 20 minutes of recharge on both my iphone and ipad (taking no chances), quickly walk my dog, call the Lexus drop off place, and get a list of food items for the birthday party to my daughter since I was failing miserably at this responsibility.

It also gave me time to challenge Yvan who was intent on convincing me how compassionate the Israeli Defense Force is, and how all of Hamas wanted all Israelis dead, and how Hamas targeted civilians but Israel warns people before bombing.

I said: You are missing information. Do you know 10 or so Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military in the month or two before the three settler youth were kidnapped and killed?

Yvan: That’s not true.

Me: Yes, it is. There are videos of two Palestine young men just walking by Ofer prison – you know, where the prisoners are on hunger strike – who were killed by snipers. It’s all on the video, they were just walking by, no one else around. Killed, dead, down.

Yvan: We don’t have snipers.

Me: Okay, prison guards then, the guys in the towers at Ofer.

Yvan: So what were these guys doing before then? What were they throwing? They must have done something.

Me: Nope, want me to send you the video? They were just walking by, not even looking up. You see them hit. They’re not talking to anyone. No one else was around. They’re walking next to the prison wall at about the distance from where you’re sitting to that tree.

Yvan: Sure, send me the video.

Me: Okay, you let me know what you know and I’ll let you know what I know.

Giving him credit, he did bring up that he understood that Israel had taken “their” land and that resentment was justified. He also seemed to like Fatah in the West Bank and made sure I understood his father’s very best friend lived in Jenin. His father is a mechanical engineer and they had some business together. (I did not bring up the ongoing weekly nonviolent protests against the occupation in Jenin, but did say “business together is the fastest road to peace.” He shook his head yes.)

I ran into the house and returned to give him a copy of the book “Sixty Years, Sixty Voices: Israeli and Palestinian Women” in English, Hebrew and Arabic. (Get it at Amazon.) I tell him, “I was the editor, photographer, and primary interviewer.”

Yvan: Wow, this is a real book.

Me: That it is.

Back to the garage

At 6:25 my daughter and son-in-law took me back to the Giant grocery store, before going on to a party. She went in with me, to the Solutions desk, then the garage.

I said: Someone took my balloons! Someone took the balloons! They were tied right here, right here on the door. Someone took them!

Towing

At 6:45 Lee pulled up in front from District Towing. I rode with him pass the man in the cubicle. He took the ticket with no hesitation.

Lee: Where is your car?

Me: One level down. It had balloons tied to the door, but someone took them.

Lee, seeing the car: My boss said it would be a Toyota.

Me: The call was placed by the locksmith. He might have been confused. (Yeah, right.) Are you going to be able to get it out of here?

Lee: No problem.

I adore Lee. We talked about the amazing technology of modern day towing, how the little towing wheels go under the car’s back wheels and pump them up, and how it all clicks into place.

Me: Any chance you’re going through town?

Lee: Sure, need a ride?

Me: Would love it.

(I contemplated asking him to wait while I ran inside and bought more balloons, but figured he was being too nice for me to ask for anything more.)

7:15, walking home

Lee let me out a few blocks from my home. Such a beautiful summer night. My car would be going around Dupont Circle as couples strolled hand in hand and ate at outside cafes.

I let the balm soak into me. And, once home, I went out again with my dog who like me was slightly crazed, and I thought of the bombing and killing of people far away and so very close.

The birthday party

We had 15 children and 14 adults here this morning. There were no balloons, but my grandson didn’t notice. He was happy and surrounded by his best friends – I didn’t know he had that many, and he taught me how to play “Ghost in the Graveyard” where if the chosen “ghost” looks at you, you can only breath, sneeze, cough, or blink, or you become a ghost’s helper.

Twelve miles away my Lexus has a note on it with my name, telephone number, and the words “NO!!! Keys.” I expect to hear from them tomorrow morning.

The pain in the world right now, the violence, the imbecilic belief that there are reasons to kill other people . . . I am haunted. All those people praying to stay alive, to keep breathing, sneezing, coughing, and blinking, and not become ghost’s helpers. All those people.

A Death That Knocks First

Posted on July 14, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

[Moments after I wrote this blog, I received word that Egypt was working to negotiate a ceasefire between Israel and Palestine. The first deadline for that ceasefire passed as of this morning, July 15. I am sharing this blog as originally written with the undying hope the violence will end. At this point the word to me is that Hamas is reluctant to agree without guarantees of the opening of the Rafah gate between Gaza and Egypt (which seals them off from the world) and the release of the more than 500 Palestinian men arrested in the past three weeks.]

. . .

God speaking, Isaiah 55:3 – Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live.

The third slaughter of Gazans in under five years is happening now. The total number killed in Operation Cast Lead – what the Arab world calls the Gaza Massacre – in the first days of 2009 was around 1400, the majority of them women and children. Thirteen Israelis were killed.

The number of Gazans killed between November 14-21, 2012 in Operation Pillar of Defense was 168, the majority of them women and children. Six Israelis were killed.

The last total I saw for the number of Gazans killed so far in Operation Protective Edge is more than 170 (plus another 1000+ injured), the majority of them women and children. Netanyahu says that with “this kind of enemy” Israel will take any means it needs to defend itself. So far no Israelis have been killed. If they do a ground assault, there will be Israelis killed. It is a guarantee. Everyone is crazy.

Thanks to Facebook I have seen things – body parts, emptied faces and skulls, spilling guts – that will never leave my mind. Ever. I do not regret it, I want to see it, but so far I have not reposted these realities of death as an explosion that tears your body into pieces on FB, and I will not here.

Seeing these things – the redness of blood, the same redness of everyone’s blood, flowing over the grey of concrete reduced to a powder that covers even the body that still bleeds – I am shocked to see my immediate world look the same as always. There are birds in my garden, photos of loved ones on my desk. I have a piano, it is intact and can be played.

People walk by, eat in restaurants, laugh. The world has become surreal, a stage of normalcy while on the other side of the scrim people kill each other. It is not just in Israel and Palestinian, it is many places, but this is the barbarism that has delivered itself to me in video after video at my door.

The IDF and Israeli citizens – the majority judging by what I see – say: “We warn Gazans where we will strike, we give a “knock” ahead of time with a warning shot. We are humane. Hamas is not humane, they don’t warn us where the missile will come” This is posted in varying ways as though it makes sense.

NOTE 1: the IDF only gives warning “knocks” sometimes, and when they do, it provides only a teeny window of time for everyone to evacuate that building before it is destroyed. A “knock” is a smaller, presumably non-lethal bomb launched to a rooftop. That is, the occupants hear of the impending destruction of their home, if not members of their family or themselves, a minute or two in advance.

In one video I saw the “knock” hit one building but the real-deal bomb landed next to that building where the people would have evacuated. Deliberate? I don’t think so. I think the IDF really thinks they are humanitarian by sending warning “knocks” – and pamphlets telling people to flee before the ground invasion. They even occasionally call residents in a building and tell them in Hebrew (huh?) that they have five minutes to flee. Of course, this method of protecting people is not fail safe. Extended families are being wiped off the map.

NOTE 2: Hamas cannot give warnings because they cannot pinpoint their missiles. Hamas launches missiles that go more or less willy-nilly, which along with the effectiveness of Israel’s anti-missile system, Iron Dome, is why to date not a single Hamas missile has killed an Israeli or seriously injured one. Iron Dome has been 90% or more effective, fortunately, in shooting down any missiles coming to populated areas inside Israel.

I am not saying Hamas operatives are, or are not, humane. I am furious that they used funds and time and energy and intent to obtain missiles instead of strengthening the infrastructure, health care, facilities, and education inside Gaza. I understand the boycott on materials, but they got missiles in. I understand the isolation, containment, limitations, and humiliation. Or maybe I don’t. No, of course, I cannot, I have no idea. But to use what little you have to bring in missiles is, as I see it, wrong-headed, even unconscionable.

I think the people launching missiles from Gaza would kill many Israelis if they could. Yet, I do not believe it is sufficient grounds to kill someone – and the innocents near them – on the theory that they would kill you if they could when, in fact, they cannot. There have to be more clever, not to mention more ethical, ways to disarm someone’s desire to kill you. Being a good neighbor for one.

The underlying fault line of the “right to protect yourself” argument is that, when you apply it equally to Palestinians as well as Israeli, the whole premise is exposed as absurd. It is an invitation to cyclical slaughter. It has no applicability towards peace. It shows no inclination towards the creativity, healing, and courage needed to achieve mutual beneficial peace. (It is, bottom line, why most women are better peace builders than the many men who believe bigger and harder is the answer to everything.)

NOTE 3: There are demonstrations against the assault in the UK, Belgium, Australia and elsewhere, and even inside Israel. Haven’t seen anything much in the US.

I have been inundated emotionally and psychologically. I have precious friends – Palestinian and Israeli – who are too close to danger, including Rula Salameh, whose article as a Palestinian mother living in East Jerusalem was in the New York Times last week.

I have read article after article documenting in detail the sequence that set off this opportunity for Netanyahu to continue to destroy the peace process (even Kerry placed the blame at his feet), to destroy a unity government that would have brought Hamas into a moderate coalition with Fatah and the West Bank, and to further weaken Gaza.

For one thing, the Israeli authorities knew within hours that the three kidnapped settlers were dead. They had a phone tape of the shooting and the boys’ blood was found in the kidnappers’ abandoned car. Yet for a week, even without telling the parents, they used the excuse that they were searching for the youth to arrest and imprison more than 500 Palestinian men, demolish and invade homes, have confrontations that led to several Palestinian being killed, and to stir up – unleash? – hatred against Palestinians. It didn’t take much.

Among the things I will never forget are the videos of young Israeli males in the streets of Jerusalem chanting “Death to Arabs” and stopping taxis looking for Palestinian drivers or passengers to beat up. My friend Rula told me by phone that she is scared. This is a woman who has maneuvered me in the West Bank, without bothering to comment, around IDF gun shooting and tear gas. She has a television program on which she sometimes calls Palestinian Authority ministers on camera to help out people in need immediately. She has nerves of steel and decades of experience.

Now she is scared. She lives with her parents and son in Beit Hanina in Arab East Jerusalem only two minutes from the home of the Palestinian boy who was kidnapped and burned to death. Her son is the same age. She told me Israelis are beating shopkeepers.

What can one say? How does one say it? If bombs don’t bring peace – they don’t – then can words?

This crisis has taken me to the Bible, a place I have not visited since I was in high school.

God speaking, Isaiah 55:11-

. . . so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

He’s speaking presumably to the Jews, and He states that He desires a place that will: bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater.

He – I’m ceding to the masculine just to be super-nice – says: Isaiah 55:9 –

As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Are we not to emulate God’s ways, to take the high road?

The hatred I am seeing on Facebook, from people on both sides, is essentially telling God to go to hell. There is a valiant minority – and oh the courage and oh the grief – that calls for an immediate ceasefire and for listening to each other, for tending, for examining one’s own culpability.

We must watch our words so that they are as free as possible of self-delusion, so that they recognize that we are equally human, and so that they have the intent of peace.

I don’t think a “knock” before you bomb people is Yahweh speaking. I don’t think Hamas launching missiles into Israel is Allah speaking.

If our words truly were emulating God, they would be for peace and caring and forgiving and getting our facts rights and not deluding ourselves about our favored status and not denying harm we have done.

Then God says, if you are good boys and girls: Isaiah 55:12 –

You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.

I read this as that to deliberately kill someone else is to deny the God you profess to worship.

And, yes, I know that both the Koran and the Torah can be interpreted from select verses to encourage you either to fight or to reach out in peace. Shouldn’t we choose the verses that bring good to the world – ourselves and others?

Does Gravity Have Weight? Or when will insanity stop?

Posted on July 8, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

My six-year-old grandson knows the important questions:

“Gramma Trisha, does gravity have weight?”

Me: “I’m not sure. Why don’t we look it up?”

“And if light has weight.”

Me: “Right, un-huh, that too.”

Well, I couldn’t decipher all of the Google entries and complex formulas re gravity having weight, but the consensus seems to be that gravity does not have weight. So that is what I told Ben with the caveat that we might find out in the future that it does have weight.

Also light does not have weight, except – oh, yeah, those photons when light is being particle and not wave – the ultimate morphing job. So it gets wobbly, but I told Ben that most people believe light does not have weight but maybe in the future we would find out that it does. I give the future free reign to surprise us all, hopefully for the good.

It’s not that I think that public opinion about gravity or light having weight is going to fluctuate like opinions about eating gluten or the efficacy of melatonin. It’s that I believe scientific inquiry will continue to advance in corners of civilization shielded from Creationism, Fundamentalism, war, violence, and other social ills. Little clusters of scientists – and other rational people open to change as new evidence comes in – will continue to explore all the aspects of being alive on our planet. The DNA thread with courage, the one that urges us to learn the truth based on repeatable evidence, will prevail through hard times.

Hard times such as when great factions of people are trying to set back the clock on women’s rights, deny climate change, violate the principles of separation of religion and state, carry assault weapons – omg! – into market places, help the rich get richer without caring for the poor, divert funds away from health care and education, and destroy Mother Earth on the assumption that she will just keep on giving to her spoiled children.

Ben reminded me of the important things: we will not fling out into the cosmos whether gravity has weight or not, and the sun will come up tomorrow whether light has weight or not. We have what we need to make love, give joy, and provide health and safety and justice for others on this planet.

Abrupt change right here:

I am in grieving about what is happening in Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel. I know that I am grieving more profoundly because I have friends there. It is personal.

The deaths in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and the Ukraine are larger, perhaps more horrendous, though Israel is announcing – perhaps has already begun – massive bombing attacks on Gaza and is talking about land forces.

[A moment ago, as I was doing a final check on this blog, reports came in that bombs have reached Jerusalem, missiles seemingly from Gaza. How horrendous this is going to become is beyond my desire to imagine or ability to face at this moment. It is not impossible that Gaza will be decimated. The below continues more or less as originally written.]

These attacks escalated from the actions of two hate-filled violent Palestinians that Hamas seems genuinely not to have known or to have been able to control. We now know that the Israeli authorities knew within hours that the three settler youth were most assuredly dead. They had the phone tape that included the gun shots and the songs of the monsters who killed them, celebrating their deaths. For a week they didn’t tell anyone, including the parents, while they (re)arrested more than 500 Palestinians, demolished homes, and managed in the process to kill at least 10 Palestinians. Gangs of Israelis – mostly young men by the videos I saw – took to the street chanting “Death to Arabs.”

This is the open warfare that I know the most about. It is more manageable and personal to me than Syria, Iraq, Egypt, the Ukraine. I know the territory and can wrap my head around this catastrophe. It just happens to be that way. I have no excuses, just lack of knowledge of the other horrors.

At the same time the US Stock Exchange is reaching new highs. Is this because we feel separated and insular from the fight, therefore safe? We are the island of stability? Or are we grateful that for once we aren’t sending troops anywhere? Let them all kill each other while we will eat cake? Or are investors just oblivious? [Later note: let’s see how the Exchange reacts to today’s suicidal insanity.]

I sold my stock in Caterpillar Inc. a month ago, before the Presbyterian Church divested from its stock holdings in companies like Caterpillar Inc that contribute to Israel’s containment and occupation of Palestinians. I can’t hold stock in a company that helps build nine-meter high concrete walls to hold a nation in and provides bulldozers to level people’s homes.

I don’t think Caterpillar Inc. noticed my sale, though I did send them a note about it. I also told them I would add the sale to my blog. Hence, here it is.

Returning to the light:

Maybe gravity and light have weight yet to be measured. Maybe they don’t.

But death and violence and racism and prejudice and hate do have weight. People fall when they die, when they are battered. So do morals of a culture, so do hopes and aspirations, so do opportunities, so do fragile psyches, so do the minds of children when they lose their parents. (I remember in Afghanistan. You could look into children’s eyes and see immediately who would rise and laugh again and who would be broken for the rest of their lives.)

Light may have weight, or it may not. But it can cleanse and heal and return us to sanity and give us hope and help us to forgive, and that is something of such value that it must have substance.

Whether that substance relates to something in our oh so real physical bodies and brains, or if it is the vapor of an elixir that comes from some great elsewhere doesn’t matter. I believe we can call light into our beings, and into our lives – and we must now. Now.

Each one of us for all of us. Because that’s how light works. It is not exclusive.

If you don’t share light and healing, it will leave you to the dark, which gives you and me only one viable option as I don’t think you like dark and injury anymore than I do.

Spoiler Alert: Israeli and Palestinian Denials Exposed

Posted on April 15, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

[At the end of this blog is an exclusive interview with Dr. Mohammed Dajani that came in while I was writing. This is your incentive to read the entire blog.]

Two things have converged to overcome my resistance, as a social activist in recovery, to writing a political blog. Both relate to Palestine and Israel, the only conflict in which I am still informed by more than normal daily media. I receive five to ten FB videos, articles, and commentary each day in addition to “keeping up” through friends. It is enough to be thoroughly depressed.

I do not know, as I start, if what I will write will be measured or intemperate, if it will be calm or fed up. I learned early that Palestinians are occupied, unprotected, herded, and blamed. I learned this in a dozen plus trips to the area and as the editor-photographer-interviewer for the book “Sixty Years, Sixty Voices: Israeli and Palestinian Women,” available on Amazon.

Earlier, as the founder and head of the international non-profit organization Peace X Peace, I could not say my truth directly. We will discover together what I will say now.

Note: While this blog focuses on Big Lies and Denials of Israelis and Palestinians, the reader needs to remember that every culture has its lies, denials, and convenient rewriting of history. It is just that the conflicts in this region are alive and kicking – and if they can be overcome, they could be a model of immense value for getting beyond the misconceptions, unexamined stereotypes, and just plain slander the rest of us indulge in.

Thing One: having to do with the Holocaust

Dr. Mohammed Dajani, professor at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem, recently took 27 Palestinian students to Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland. He returned home to what the media calls “sharp criticism.” The university issued a statement clarifying they had nothing to do with the trip, and friends advised him to take a leave of absence.

Point is: Some Palestinians do not want to fully acknowledge the Holocaust. It is not emotionally or politically expedient, and they believe it is at least partial fabrication. They say Dr. Dajani is participating in brainwashing Palestinian students.

Dr. Dajani is my friend. He is a gentle bear of a man, studious, a bit shy, has a collection of posters from classic American movies, and founded a moderate political movement called “Wasatia” to provide a voice for moderate Muslims. Wasatia provides a model for the majority of Palestinians who want an option other than an extremist Muslim political party on the one hand and secular political party on the other.

He once made a video named “Big Dream/Small Hope.” It started with the big dreams of both sides. A drawing showed the Palestinian dream of all Israelis leaving Israel on EL AL airlines. The next drawing showed the Israeli dream of all Palestinians leaving the West Bank across the desert on camels. He explained, when the laughter died down, that the big dreams weren’t going to come true for either side so we needed to look at realistic small hopes. Taking the students to Auschwitz was a realistic small, and amazingly big, act of courage. It was looking at truth.

Deeply criticized upon their return, Dr. Dajani said:

My response to all this tirade is that my duty as a teacher is to teach, to have my students explore the unexplored, to open new horizons for my students, to guide my students out of the cave of perceptions and misperceptions to see the facts and the reality on the ground, to break the walls of silence, to demolish the fences of taboos, to swim against the tide in search of truth… I do not regret for one second what I did. I will do it again if given the opportunity. I will not hide, I will not deny. I will not be silent. I will not remain a bystander even if the victims of the suffering I show empathy for are my perpetrators and my occupiers. The aim is not to get any one’s approval but to do the right thing.

How’s that for a statement against lies and convenient denials?

For me, this event has the added dimension that the trip was co-organized by a peace program of Friedrich Schiller University (FSU) in Jenin, Germany. My first connection with FSU was in 1991 when my then husband William Melton and I chose it to be the German university in the Melton International Education Foundation, the first social network to connect university students. It grew to include a university each in India, China, and Chile plus Dillard University in New Orleans. To experience this connection between Muhammed Dajani and FSU has a surreal quality about it as a circle uniting parts of my past.

Thing Two: having to do with Israeli massacres in 1948

Forget “A land without people for people without land.” It never was the truth. The state of Israel was created in 1948 on land where Palestinians had lived for thousands of years, generation after generation. It was the land of their ancestors, and their olive and lemon grove were family. (Other cultural groups had lived there also over the thousands of years but that is not key to this discussion. Also a minority of Jews had lived there, welcomed and peaceful neighbors, for hundreds of years, which could have been key to this discussion in a parallel universe where people found peaceful means to make changes.)

The first major massacre of Arab Palestinians by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was at Deir Yassin where 250 Arab villagers were slaughtered. It doesn’t take as much killing after something like that to have families flee mid-meal when they heard the IDF was only a mile or two from their village. It was a tactic for clearing the territory, and it worked.

Yet there was more killing. I have met old men, refugees, who were children when they saw it. This truth is denied by people – Jewish or not, Israeli or not – who are unable to accept it as something that came out of the Jewish culture. I experience it as a pattern of selective denial that continues with the occupation and enclosure of the West Bank, the ongoing building of illegal settlements, and the siege of Gaza. It is ugly to look at and examine – but how can it be changed if it cannot be acknowledged?

So when Theater J in Washington DC decided, under the directorship of Ari Roth, to perform “The Admission,” a play that examines a probable 1948 massacre of Palestinians in a small village, an ad hoc group set up to protect the image of Israel in arts launched a campaign to have funds withheld to the Jewish Community Center, which owns the building where Theater J is housed. Their argument was that the play was a lie written and propagated by self-hating Jews. The theater, playwright, and ultimately the JCC stood on the side of art having a right to examine and question.

The production appeared close to being cancelled entirely. Some funds were withheld, but a decision was made to “downgrade” the production to a “workshop” with no sets, no costumes, and a shorter run. What happened was, the funds were more than made up by supporters of Ari and Theater J, and the play was sold out every night, received extensive media coverage – and has been given an extended run in a space in another DC theater. I was involved as a supporter from the beginning.

SO WHAT WE HAVE IS: many Israelis and many Palestinians want to deny the essential truths of the other’s unspeakable injuries – and Israelis are fractured today between those who as least suspect what their government (and extremist settlers) are doing on the other side of the wall, and those who don’t know and don’t want to know. Denial is the name of the game in Israel.

JUST A COUPLE PERSONAL EXPERIENCES: I have been told by Israelis that Gazans should all be nuked because they were so violent (try that one on for size!). And I was once confronted as the key speaker in a public forum of women leaders in Jordan with “Excuse me but I need to do an intervention. Mrs. Melton, you are ignoring the fact that the Jews were behind the attack on the Twin Towers.” “What?” “Everyone knows that. And the Jews were warned not to show up for work there that day.” “It’s a lie.”

THIS EXCLUSIVE JUST IN FROM MOHAMMED DAJANI: my questions in italics

Would you make this trip again to Auschwitz?

Certainly I would do this again and for different sectors of society such as women, religious leaders, teachers, journalists, secondary school kids, etc. in order to disseminate the message to the different sectors of the Palestinian community that the Holocaust did take place, it was most evil, and showing respect for the memory of its victims and empathy with those who were the target is the right and moral thing to do.

Is the truth necessary?

The truth is necessary because it is an important part of life. There is an urge in each of us to search for truth and to seek truth. Maybe the search is elusive but it is necessary for our self esteem and self dignity. To know the truth is better than to remain ignorant. I am not for the quote, “Ignorance is bliss.” God in the Quran urges: {And say, O my Lord advance me in knowledge}. God also differentiates between people with knowledge and those who don’t have knowledge: {“God will exalt those who believe among you, and those who have been granted knowledge, to high ranks.”}

If Palestinians know about the Holocaust and if Israelis know and understand the facts of the occupation, including the 1948 Nakba, I believe that this knowledge would generate empathy, and in turn, empathy would advance the reconciliation process.

What is your standing at Al-Quds University now? What is your future?

I am Director of Libraries and Founding Director of the American Studies Center. As for my future, it is in the hands of God.

Are there people who are personally angry with you?

There are those who are full of anger and frustration among the Palestinians as a result of past and present sufferings and they are directing all their anger and frustration against me. How does it make me feel? It is making me feel like a psychiatrist and not a teacher. It hurts me but it does not matter to me since I know I am doing the right thing.

. . .

Dr. Dajani signed off with wishes for “Happy Holidays.” I extend those wishes and join you, surely, in wishing that all people lived by the best tenets of their religions. And that all of us had less fear of the ugly truths of our historic and current actions and more celebration of the search for truth, as shown by Theater J, Ari Roth, and Mohammed Dajani.

War = Evolutionary Flaw?

Posted on March 26, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

War proves that evolution is hodge-podge. We create master works of art, architecture, technology, and exploration, and then we destroy them along with each other.

The glitch in survival of the fittest is that mean greedy strong people – think Huns, think small pox in trading post blankets, think any dictator – lack empathy and seem to have little appreciation for the arts, education, or other people. Well, some monsters appreciate the fine arts so long as they get to own them.

Since before the sacking of Constantinople, the multiple fires of the Library of Alexandria, and the Crusades, the dynamic has been the same. People strive together to learn, create knowledge and beauty, reveal the mysteries of existence, and build new cultures. Then some ruffians come over the hill with weapons. Destroy, rebuild, destroy, rebuild. Certainly humans have resilience and persistence. We keep striving to the light.

These days, the “destroy” part of “destroy and rebuild” is on the move, literally. Displays of strength everywhere. Russian troops along the Ukraine border, Israeli fighter pilots flying low over Gaza as a reminder, Egypt judges condemning hundreds of Islamists to mass executions, as hundreds of thousands of Syrians seek refuge from violent madness.

It’s been awhile since it’s looked this bad. The world is fracturing more than usual along the usual lines of fear, greed, suspicion, denial, self-righteousness, and beliefs of having a monopoly on the One True God – and which One True God is on our side, and we, being created in One True God’s image, should rightly rule over others. “Dominion over the earth” and all that.

Well, I don’t know if Putin has One True God beyond himself. He might take up his entire world.

Ever feel like a small fuzzy mammal trying to avoid being trounced by very large reptiles? Very large reptiles that never look down? Who think only they and the other large reptiles exist?

If my evolutionary metaphor is getting out of hand, it’s the panic speaking. Remember the dodos? They never got upset, and they were wiped out. On the other hand, lemmings jump off cliffs and wild horses stampede and it’s no benefit to any of them. What to do? What to do? “I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date (with peace).”

Last night I had dinner with a fellow peace worker . . . Yes, dear readers, that is my background that until now I have avoided bringing into my emerging blogger career. So, last night I had dinner with a fellow peace worker, a veteran with decades of training. I told him I was worried.

I told him that, since stepping back from the peace business, I’ve started to lose control of my professionally-imposed balance regarding cruel people and idiots. Yes, I said that. I said “cruel people” and “idiots.” I also said “blind people,” and “people who think they are liberal but aren’t.”

I told him that I had started wanting the last word, that my nonviolence was becoming tinged with the impulse to squash everyone I felt interfered with love and song and flowers and truth, and that I was on the last dregs of patience.

I also said that I felt there just might be something wrong with these impulses. He leaned back and said, “It’s part of getting older.” He told me we have earned the right to be cranky.

I said, “I can’t see a single reason why people fight each other. Not one. I just want to shake people and say ‘stop it, just stop’.”

He said, “Yes, they should just stop. Maybe in a year, maybe ten, maybe a hundred.”

And that is the flaw in evolution: not all humans can tell what is good for them. I hope the rest of us can live with that.

Creationism has it worse. Any God that nudged the pieces this way and that is a pretty sorry god.

So we’ve got evolution – and free will within the limits of what’s possible in the constraints conflict places on us.

My free will chooses to support those who create master works of beauty and exploration and answers and solutions. My free will supports the peace makers. My free will sides with those who see that it’s a miracle that we exist and who tend that miracle with grace, forgiveness, and generosity.

My free will still believes in the One True God of “love your neighbor.”

Hope is a phoenix, not a dove

Posted on March 19, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

Common images of hope are wimpy: lights at ends of tunnels, birds’ wings, drops of water after a dry spell. But I don’t think hope is like that. I think it is a tide that can well up as a sea change from depths of muck, shipwrecks, and old tires. I think it is a hairy monster that refuses to die. I think it is growly and tenacious and says “f**k you” to things that prod it in the side.

How else would people in real duress survive. Birds’ wings? What? To fly over the 8-meter high concrete walls around the West Bank?

Drops of water? For what, to lift up a couple tissue-petaled flowers when you need a torrent?

A light that’s over there somewhere far away… ? Well, maybe my analogy breaks down on this one. A light in the dark is always a good thing. No metaphors are ever 100% exact because a thing is the thing it is, not something else.

What you need in real duress is not something that can be taken down quickly by a bulldozer, men with guns, poverty, or prejudice.

Hope is the power that rises out of compost. It is what allows families and loved ones to take care of themselves for their future’s sake after their daughter, sister, father, friend is killed in a revolution or protest of Arab Spring or…. Well, you name it. There certainly are enough battles going on around the world.

Hope is “I will not be stopped by you” by a woman raped in India, the DRC, or Minneapolis. Hope is Malala after being shot in the head by the Taliban.

Hope is “you harmed me, but I when I return I will be stronger and I will win, or I will die trying.” And some people win, which is why hope is an evolutionary plus.

Hope is somehow connected to morality. I am not, in case you haven’t gotten the tone, talking about hopes for wealth and power. I am talking about hopes for opportunity, for a chance, for equal rights, safety, expression of true selves, creativity, nourishment and heath, freedom of travel, education, justice.

Hope is somehow connected to morality. It is aligned with steely-backboned non-violence and creativity with little elements of playfulness that give it a Zen advantage and flexibility through repression and deprivation and prejudice.

Hope is somehow connected to morality because it aligns with joy, caring, truth, nourishment, education, being free to dance, and pursuit of happiness in just societies.

Okay, why today does hope rise in me as a tidal wave filled with muck? Oh, just one more idiot in the world against the LGBT community, just one more ploy by Netanyahu, just one more battered woman, just a few hundred more Syrian refugees. Just one more last straw.

And that’s before we get to the starving lions, tigers, horses, and donkeys in the world. Were they always there and only just now coming through my mail slot?

I think I am not alone in feeling that we make a decision to live with hope or live without hope. EXCEPT, it’s not a decision because it’s not a choice. Hope is hard to put down.Try to end it and it will evade you. Try to shut it in a dark room and it will wiggle out through the keyhole. Try to snuff it, and it will burn you.

Hope is life’s desire to live. It says, “You may give up but I won’t, so get over it and keep going.”

For me it’s easy, I’m not in Crimea, or Syria, or Gaza, or the DRC, or Brazil, or North Korea. I am not in poverty, and I am not without health care. I am not clinical depressed. I am infinitely blessed. So why am I kvelling? I’m kvelling because how can I be truly happy when others suffer? I cannot. It is that annoyingly true.

Hope is connected to morality. It does not allow us to be voluntarily blind, deaf, or dumb to others. Hope cuts through excuses. It saves us, individually and collectively. It’s unmercifully stubborn about getting things right.

Fatima Gailani: President of the Afghan Red Crescent Society

Posted on January 21, 2014 by Patricia Z Smith

Since 2004 Fatima has been President of the Afghan Red Crescent Society, arguably the most powerful woman in a position to bring positive change on the ground for the Afghan people. Fatima returned to Afghanistan at the beginning of 2002 after 23 years in exile, dating from the Russian invasion when she and other members of her prominent family fled to safety in a last-minute escape complete with family jewels hidden inside baby’s clothing.

Fatima Gailani, Red Crescent, Afghanistan

During exile Fatima was a media personality in London and a spokesperson for the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan, a political party founded by her father Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani (Pir Saheb), prestigious leader of the religious order of Qadiriyyah Sufi in Afghanistan.

How I met Fatima: Days before returning to Kabul, Fatima was at my home outside of Washington, DC where she and other women experts in the nature of peace spent three days answering the question “What is peace, and how can women build it?” That meeting led to my founding Peace X Peace (“peace by peace”), the first social network connecting women to other women around the world. It grew to include thousands of members in 130 nations. Also in my family room were the novelist Isabel Allende, Susan Collin Marks, executive vice president of Search for Common Ground; Barbara Marks Hubbard, author and founder of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution; and Dr. Azizah al-Hibri, professor of law, Qur’anic expert, and founder of Karamah: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights.

I had called Fatima, as a stranger, at her home in Providence, RI where she lived with her husband Dr. Anwar ul-Haq Alhady, a tenured professor of political science at Providence University. After hearing my request, she turned to Anwar and said, “I don’t know why but I’m supposed to be at this meeting. I know we set our date to return, but I need to delay a few days.” She arrived with the others through a snowstorm, and her grace, humor, and wisdom infused our days of finding answers on how to build peace through women.

The documentary: Eight months later I went into Afghanistan with an all-women crew to document her work and the education of girls and women. The film, “Peace by Peace: Women on the Frontlines,” debuted at UN headquarters in New York in the fall of 2003. It showed women building the social components of peace in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Argentina, Burundi, and the U.S. It aired on PBS television and around the world.

The Gailani compound: When the crew and I flew into Kabul, we were with Fatima on her second return. On landing she was greeted by an entourage with red roses. The Gailani family is revered, and I was to learn that she takes such recognition in stride and with grace.

The family compound where she was raised was taken over first by the Russians who used a large secondary building to hold prisoners and then by the Taliban who used the same building for torture and imprisonment. After the Taliban’s fall the compound was returned to Pir Gailani who used the same building for tribal leaders who were temporarily displaced. They sat in a circle under a large tree Fatima had planted as a girl and told me they became accustomed to women in the workplace during the Communist rule.

Reading Fatima’s comments, keep in mind a woman who combines confidence with a whimsical sense of humor that serves her well in one of the world’s most difficult jobs.

Fatima, was it a decision of your heart or your head to return to Afghanistan?

For me it was not an option. I was forced to leave but every second of my life was to prepare myself so I could come back to help my country. I was so sure I would return that I would dream about my house in Kabul. I knew the details of the curtains and the chairs I would buy. My mother would say “Are you crazy? The Russians are there, we are in exile, and you are decorating your house in Kabul!”

Later when I married Anwar, I would tell him about my garden in Jalalabad. At first he thought it was a joke and went sort of “ha ha.” I said, “It’s not ‘ha ha.’ What trees do you want in our garden in Jalalabad?” Anwar said, “Are you crazy? The Taliban are sitting in Kabul. Do you even have a piece of land in Jalalabad?” I said, “No, but I will be having a piece of land in Jalalabad. What trees do you want to plant?” He said, “Thank God we are already married because if we had had this conversation before, I would have thought you were absolutely crazy.” I said, “I am crazy but for my country and I will be going there.”

So we came back and after a couple years my father gave me the most magnificent piece of land in Jalalabad, huge and beautiful, ruined totally of course. It had seven mature palm trees, but nothing else except a panoramic view of the Spin Ghar, the white mountains. Imagine palm trees where your surroundings are mountains full of snow!

Today we have all the citrus trees you can imagine. Two weeks ago we got our first grapefruits, we got our limes from there, we had only six oranges but we will have more.

I knew I would be building things. I knew that I would be working in Afghanistan. The only thing I was praying to God was for health and enough lifetime to return.

Mine Awareness program, Fatima Gailani, Afghanistan, Red Crescent

Fatima leading mine awareness program.

Do I get tired? Yes, and there are times I miss sitting in a café without being recognized. I miss going to a supermarket, choosing my own fruits. I miss the freedoms one has in the West but I would do it again. I would come here again – and here I am.

Has the last decade affected your dreams for Afghanistan?

I never thought that I would find a rose garden. When I returned after almost 24 years of war and the Soviet invasion, and fighting over language and ethnicity, a civil war, the competition of Shias and Sunnis, the competition with the neighboring countries . . . no, I knew I would return to a totally destroyed country.

But did I think that Afghanistan would be in the list of most corrupt countries of the world? Absolutely not. I remember a very clean Afghanistan, people who were so honest. I remember a king who would walk on the streets of Kabul like a Swedish king or a northern European king. So it is devastating to see my country in the list of most corrupt countries. I am devastated we still supply more than 80 percent of the drugs in the world.

I expected the collapse of the juridical system, education system, and health system, which are repairable. But when the morality of a people is destroyed the people have to rebuild it for themselves. These things break my heart. But will I give up? Absolutely not.

What is the relationship of the Red Crescent to the Red Cross?

The Afghan Red Crescent is partially self-funded through vast properties it holds within Afghanistan, while certain projects get additional funding from the Red Cross/Red Crescent Societies of different nations in the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Some projects are also supported by the International Committee of Red Cross.

Responsibilities of the Red Crescent Society of Afghanistan

Red Crescent, Afghanistan, Red Cross, Fatima Gailani

Responding to floods in northern Afghanistan

Disaster preparedness and response
Emergency health care
Youth and volunteer training
Support for war victims
Health services
Welfare houses in Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat, Kandahar, and Jalalabad
Dissemination of information on Red Cross and Red Crescent
Raising mine awareness
Treatment of children with Ventricular Septal Defect (having a hole in their hearts)

Community health programs, Red Crescent, Fatima Gailani, women

Women in health programs

Red Crescent, Afghanistan, Fatima Gailani,

Emergency supplies

What is the initiative for children with holes in their hearts?

Tens of thousands of children in Afghanistan are born with this condition. Finding out why is the job of the UN and the Ministry of Health, but I found the way that thousands of these children have been sent abroad to be operated upon. These things make me so happy that to be president or a minister or to be in the political wheeling and dealing, . . . I don’t think I am interested.

But when I was in your father’s home in 2003 you said you might run for President of Afghanistan. You smiled, but I think you were not completely joking. You asked your brother if he would vote for you, a woman, and he hesitated.

I don’t know if my brother hesitated about voting for a woman or voting for me, or because he thought if we both ran, I could win.

Under our constitution a woman can run for the presidency, but the reason I don’t want to run for the presidency is not because people will not vote for me. I assure you among the 11 people running for the presidency today – I hope it wouldn’t sound too pompous – but I have much more chance than they have. The reason I don’t want to run for the presidency is, as I said, that I find things more important in my work with the Red Crescent.

I remember like yesterday, Patricia, when I came to your meeting and looking outside and seeing the beautiful snow. I called to tell you afterwards that maybe those days in your house changed my life. Well, they did change my life. The future of women became more important for me than my own political future.

Then, in the Red Crescent another eye opener happened. When I came here, it was not only women who live in misery.

461220 A huge number of people live in misery, the majority of children live in misery. Sometimes families are cruel to their children. People produce children without any thought and they can’t feed them and send them to the streets so they will be a source of income. We have to rescue these children. This is so unacceptable that changing this is much more important to me than being in politics.

Outside the four walls of my garden or my parents’ garden or my sister’s garden, I see the people’s poverty, their discomfort, and the extraordinarily expensive city that Kabul has become. Afghanistan is too expensive and not affordable for the people of Afghanistan. These are the things that bother me.

Are you in personal danger?

I never have armed guards. I don’t even have guards, I don’t have anyone with weapons around me. I have one person who sits in the car next to the driver without a weapon so if the car doesn’t work or we’re in a traffic jam, I have someone with me. Yes, I have been twice in great danger and it was from a huge explosion at the Indian Embassy because I live next to the Indian Embassy. Was the target me? Of course not.

In Afghanistan, like in Iraq or Syria or many countries, it is very important that you take precaution. Don’t go unnecessarily to places that are not safe. And if you happen to be in a wrong place at the wrong time, then it is your luck. That is it.

What is Anwar’s position now?

He was Governor of the Central Bank, and then Minister of the Department of Finance, and then Minister of Commerce and Industries. He wanted to run for the presidency, but for whatever political reasons that is not happening. This was sad for me because as the first lady of Afghanistan, I could have done a lot. As President of Afghan Red Crescent Society, I am doing things that are appreciated by the people of my country, but had I been an example for women of Afghanistan as the first lady, I could have changed lots of things for women and children. I could have opened the eyes of women outside my country to see that together we could change the situation of the people, especially of women and children.

If you are serious about changing the situation of women in any country, you have to start with your own family. One reason that in the late king Zaher Shah’s time the situation of women improved was because all the women of the royal family were involved. Princess Belqees was the head of women volunteers and worked with people directly. Her daughter Princess Maryam was a maternity nurse who would go and take the hand of a woman villager giving birth, so changes came faster and were more accepted.

Today the women in their own families are kept locked with the expectation that changes should come through other people’s wives and daughters and sisters and mothers. It cannot work like that. In my family all the men and women are involved in social work.

What will happen in the upcoming presidential elections?

The candidates are almost equal and are known to the country equally. They are also known equally to the Western media, which makes a huge difference for the outcome. Almost all have worked with the government at a very high post, and they either did well or they did not do well or they could have done better.

Also, lots of military changes are happening but, above all, huge financial changes will happen because lots of people will lose their jobs when the NGOs (non-governmental organizations) run away from the country. Most of the Western barracks of the soldiers will close down, and most of the men and women who work for them will lose their jobs. So we will have a very bad financial shock. This makes it a little bit dangerous. Will the candidates be able to go to the provinces and to the villages? Will they meet with the people directly or introduce themselves only through media?

Do you believe the government needs to be based in religious law?

We have a constitution. You don’t change the constitution every day. It doesn’t happen in other countries and it will not happen in my country. The Afghan constitution is based on Islamic law as it is in many other countries.

If democracy is the rule of people then this is the wish of the people. If you knock at the door of any Afghan person, they will tell you exactly what they want, and this is what they want.

I was one of the commissioners for the constitution. I traveled to five provinces and in every district of that province, a constitution based on Islamic law was what the people wanted. So if we claim that we want democracy, then this is democracy because it is what the people want.

When I was in Kabul twelve years ago most women still wore the burka, but they were organizing, going back to school.

Afghanistan, girl, salute, Red Crescent The changes for women are a revolution. Millions of educated girls are rising every day. I don’t think anyone could lock these young women up. They are educated, in touch with the people, and don’t like the imported feminism. They have their own feminism with roots in this country. They are very active, and very visible in our parliament, both the upper house and lower house. And they are visible in civil government, and in universities, especially private universities where they are almost 50 percent of each class.

The women are eager to do much better than men because, like anywhere in the world, a woman has to be better than a man to get the same job. You know it is a fact that, with the exception of a few northern European countries, everywhere in the world you have to be much stronger and better than a man to get the equal job.

Has equality come? Not yet. But in the constitution women and men are dealt with equally. On paper, in laws, and in new laws to come the voice of women is being heard. If we are ignored, we make sure we just impose ourselves so we will be equal with all other members of the society.

The burka is not an issue. We want educated women with burka or without burka. If a woman wants to wear a burka, no one should be allowed to tell her not to wear a burka. If she doesn’t want to wear a burka, no one should be forcing her to wear a burka.

We have a new fashion, very elegant outfits, very conservative but beautiful with matching scarves. You will be surprised at the fashion that has come that suits our environment, our religion, and the requirements of our country.

But we hear of terrible things still happening to women.

Terrible things happen in Kabul and outside of Kabul. They happen because it takes a long time to stop these in any country, but the most important thing is that now people have the courage to report them, to say something wrong has been done to their daughter and they want justice. Instead of being ashamed and killing their daughters to hush up a dishonor, now reporting horrible things that happen to women has become common.

But there is a huge difference between the big cities – Kabul, Mazar, Herat, Jalalabad – and other provinces, districts, and villages. But even in the districts, because of the radio and other information, people know how to report abuses. Nonetheless, bad things happen and we have to find ways to stop them.

What is really difficult to accept is that still women mostly don’t get their inheritance rights because, especially outside the cities, the inheritance is land and men are reluctant to lose the power of owning the land of their fathers and forefathers. This is why more than 80 percent of women in villages don’t get their rightful Islamic inheritance as written in the Quran. This should be among the easier things to fix.

Has anything changed regarding the poppy crop?

I don’t know where cultivation has changed or hasn’t changed as this is the responsibility of the Ministry of Counter Narcotics. But in defense of most people who cultivate poppies, I have been saying for 12 years that our people have very little land, and nothing has been done to educate them not to produce too many children. They have to feed their children and there’s no governmental social welfare to take care of their children. So they cultivate what makes the best profit from their little land. Unfortunately in the majority of places, it is still poppies, even though the poor man who is cultivating them doesn’t get much money.

Rose oil is worth more than opium. Saffron is too, and the saffron of Afghanistan is the best in the world . . . but did we do anything to open a market for it? Did we help the farmers to pack it? Did we help them to collect it? For one or two years farmers grew the saffron, but at the end the farmers had to leave their towns to sell the saffron at a very low price.

That same saffron when it goes across the border is sold at a very high price in the name of Iranian saffron. So very little has been done to help these people to sell their alternative crops. If we help them, I think at least 50 percent of the problem could be solved.

What are you most proud of in your work at the Red Crescent?

Maybe my expectations of myself are a bit too much, as no matter what I do I feel I’ve only fulfilled one of my duties. But I am proud of the comradeship I have created. Most of my employees are much younger, but we can communicate with each other. If they have a critique, they express it openly.

If you have a complaint of your mother, you say “Mother, I don’t like the way you cook your cake. Put in a little more sugar or less sugar” or “I don’t like the topping.” So they tell me how to change things and most of the times because they are connected to regular people, it improves my work, so I am proud I have that open door with my employees.

A last word?

There is one thing that I am proud of for myself that is not directly to do with the Red Crescent – I have killed the desire of political aims and political gains and political wants that a human being may have. Today I can honestly tell you I have no political ambitions. All I want is to help these people who have no comrades to help them. That’s all I want.

That was not an easy thing. This I am proud of for myself.

Survival Cannot be Left Up to Men – Jean Shinoda Bolen

Posted on October 16, 2013 by Patricia Z Smith

An interview with Jean Shinoda Bolen by Patricia Smith Melton

Gas in Syria, the government shut down, kittens all over the Internet. What’s a woman to do?

We persevere, pray, seed circles, write emails, pound on doors, and realize that the grassroots really is a force for change.

But, Jean, the grassroots is being trampled on.

The grassroots rises up again because it’s only the surface that gets trampled, the roots run deeper. Look at the Arab Spring. It rose, it got trampled, and it will rise again. It is like the seasons of the myth of Persephone, where you disappear in one season and you come up in the spring. I have great faith in the collective wisdom of women.

What is the role of humor in the face of tragedy? How do we stay the course?

You have to be able to laugh at what is also ridiculous in the midst of tragedy. I have written of the goddess of healing laughter, the goddess of mirth. In the worst of times the ability of women to laugh together a moment before they cry together is a strength that humanity has through women. Men don’t seem to be able to do this.

It’s the humor that we’re in the same boat together, the humor of women to laugh at a wrinkle. It says, “We’ll get through this.”

You write of the gods in every man. Which one can we work with?

Actually all of the archetypes of the ancient Greek gods are potentially in any women. We usually have at least one of them as part of ourselves. When I am lecturing, I tap into Hermes, the messenger god. He also the one god that can go from the heights of Mt. Olympus to down into the underworld.

Some women become like Zeus. The gods are all in all of us, but men sort of repress them.

Men repress the gods or the goddesses in themselves?

The goddesses, and they suppress the gods that were not successful on Mt. Olympus and aren’t successful now. The patriarch is really hard on boys and men, it cuts them off from sources of deep meaning in themselves.

My grandson’s favorite color at age four was pink, but when another boy said pink was a “girl’s color,” he dropped it like a hot potato.

Right. That’s what happens to boys in a patriarchy where they can’t even have a choice of colors without being labeled or mislabeled.

Let’s say I’m in a situation that is confrontational, say a board meeting, and there is a man who at least fancies himself to be an alpha male, and I realize we getting nowhere. What is my best move?

In the early days of feminism there was assertiveness training about saying truth to power. You have to stay in relationship to the man as a whole person, not just the Zeus that sort of takes him over.

So you get his attention by whatever means, but not by anger, then you gain strength in unexpectedly speaking to him from your heart with authority. There is a heart authority that people recognize. It’s a more effective way to make your point than to take him head on because he cannot afford to be humiliated in front of the board. Humiliation is the major fear that alpha males avoid.

What we need are alpha males who could imagine what it might be like to be a woman, little girl or boy, a person with a different skin color or religion who cannot control their circumstances or who are not believed. Lack of imagination leads to a lack of compassion. We need imaginative, compassionate alpha males and empowered and equal women.

Do you think it is innate in a child or adolescent to want to make a difference, to bring good to the world?

Our archetypal underpinnings make us different. If, for a girl or woman, their archetypes are in the categories in which Persephone, Demeter, Hera, and Aphrodite predominate then to be attractive, to be pleasing, to be receptive is a natural thing. It is part of the psychological makeup of that girl or women.

But the girl that speaks up from the very beginning, that finds bullying innately awful, who says “that’s not fair” and wants to do something about it, she has a strong archetype of Artemis, the huntress at the heart of the moon. This is the girl who is interested in nature and is often a runner, though not always. It is an innate element in some girls from the beginning, just not for every girl.

If a tipping point is reached where women’s influence started bringing major change in in the global community, what are the first benefits we would see?

That’s easy. What I refer to as the Mother’s Agenda would be at the top of the list. We would live so we provide for all children what each of us wants for our own child. Education, health, opportunities.

And there’s reproductive rights as well because you can’t take care of more children than you can take care of. Not every woman is into being a biological mother, but all women have a kind of relationship of looking out for children, animals, nature. Maybe not all women, but almost all women have a relationship to the earth as home. We understand when you abuse women and children they don’t grow up well and terrorism is one part of that.

Can a terrorist be changed?

Almost anybody can change, but there are kids who have attachment disorders, who become sociopathic, become egoistic, and can’t see a future for themselves. These children may be raised around terrorism, but I don’t think the mothers in these cultures want their boys to grow up that way.

An alliance of mother energy can change this. We are at a teeter-totter point in history and this teeter-totter can be tipped in either direction. Women in sufficient numbers will be that pivot that tips it for the sake of the children.

Survival cannot be left up to men because they don’t know how.

That’s a strong statement.

Well, the patriarch acculturates men and, combined with the natural archetypal energies in men, it means that we have brilliant left-brained men, and the macho men of the world make the decisions for the rest of humanity. Many of them have undeveloped right brains to the point that they have asymmetrical brains. The state of the world is in the hands of men with power and many of them are not whole.

They don’t have full resources.

No, if they did they would make different decisions. If there weren’t a bullied little boy in them that had to suppress his authentic self and wear the colors he was “supposed” to wear, definitely not pink, it would be different.

But when a tipping point happens, it happens quickly. The great sign of the possibility, and it’s all related here, is the sudden acceptance of gay marriage.

I use the labyrinth as my image. You aim for the center, but as you walk the labyrinth you don’t know where you are in the path, but suddenly you’re there.

My work with individuals in this transformational change is to help people to be their authentic self, to listen for their wisdom and dreams, and to connect with bad things that happened to them as well, so they understand it is all part of the story they are living.

Each of us has our magnum opus, not a book, not a monument. We have the magnum opus of our own lives that we are meant to live out.

. . . .

Jean Shinoda Bolen’s book on Atalanta, the Greek goddess of runners known for her firm grasp of her own worth, will come out in the fall of 2014. Harper and Row Publishers is also reissuing anniversary editions of “Goddesses in Everywoman” first published 30 years ago, “Gods in Everyman” published 25 years ago, and “Goddesses in Older Women published” 10 years ago.

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