John Henry Comes a'Calling

The Legend of John Henry is one of my very favorite Tall Tales. During my 3:00 a.m. thinking loops last night, Mr. Henry strode right in and and sat me down for a talk. Or got me up for a journey - these things are hard to define. Before I tell you my tale though, you should know a little bit about this American Hero.

"Now John Henry was a mighty man, yes sir. He was born a slave in the 1840's but was freed after the war. He went to work as a steel-driver for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, don't ya know. And John Henry was the strongest, the most powerful man working those rails.

John Henry, he would spend his days drilling holes by hitting thick steel spikes into rocks with his faithful shaker crouching close to the hole, turning the drill after each mighty blow. There was no one who could match him, though many tried.

Well, the new railroad was moving along right quick, thanks in no little part to the mighty John Henry. But looming right smack in its path was a mighty enemy - the Big Bend Mountain. Now the big bosses at the C&O Railroad decided that they couldn't go around the mile and a quarter thick mountain. No sir, the men of the C&O were going to go through it - drilling right into the heart of the mountain.

A thousand men would lose their lives before the great enemy was conquered. It took three long years, and before it was done the ground outside the mountain was filled with makeshift, sandy graves. The new tunnels were filled with smoke and dust. Ya couldn't see no-how and could hardly breathe. But John Henry, he worked tirelessly, drilling with a 14-pound hammer, and going 10 to 12 feet in one workday. No one else could match him."

You can imagine my surprise when the mighty man himself sat down beside me, put his big hand gently on my shoulder and said, "Let's talk". Okie Dokie. We came to the point very quickly, standing there beside those thousand graves. A thousand lives, a thousand dreams, and the lives and dreams of all those who loved and were left behind by those workers. What a waste.

And for what gain? To get to the other side of the mountain, of course. I couldn't help but think of the giant mountain that lies smack in the path of America now as it was the source of my insomnia to begin with. What was on the other side of this crisis, this breaking down of what has always worked? If we could only see what was on the other side of the mountain, we'd know what action to take on this side. After all, if there is nothing but desolation and deprivation there, why then, let's just stay over here and make the best of it. Repair the status quo and all that.

But that doesn't seem to be our cultural bent. Our Declaration of Independence claims our birthright: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The American Dream is about progress, not happiness. We have to get to the other side of the mountain at all costs.

I wondered if we couldn't just travel the extra distance around the mountain instead of killing ourselves bashing through solid rock. Mr. Henry grinned big and bright and set off at a pace I could hardly match. I concentrated so hard on keeping up with him, I didn't pay attention to the landscape. Before long, I realized that I had lost my perspective. Where the heck was the other side of the mountain? All I knew for sure was that I was indeed going around the mountain. My heart sunk when we arrived back at the sad graves.

There hadn't been anything different on any side of the mountain except perhaps fewer dead people. There were just more mountains, and trees, and glorious towering rocks, and sweet babbling streams, and the soft murmur of life moving about its own business. But here I was, back at the hole in the rock, watching the crowd of head-smackers growing larger and more desperate to get through to the other side by the shortest route possible.

John Henry and I backed quietly away. We sat there on a rock awhile and let the fading moonlight wash over us. He never did ask if I wanted to go back to the other side of the mountain or even to the top of the mountain for a better look at what lay ahead. Mr. Henry just waited until the sounds of panic and thrashing about faded from my ears, letting me hear the stream and the soft rustling of forest life again. Then he asked to see what was in my pack. I must have looked surprised because a laugh rumbled deep in his chest. "I know you'll be heading back around that mountain. That old American Dream is bigger than both of us for sure."

So we dug through my pack: Right on top was the photo of my beautiful family, grinning and waving to me like the pictures in Harry Potter's world. I couldn't help notice they were suited up for a grand adventure. There were tools in the pack that I've picked up over the last few years: tools for healing and living comfortably in the natural world and nourishing each element of my space. I found a few souvenirs of other trips, trinkets of sad stories and happy times that have made me ready. And we found a whole lot of extra room, empty pockets that seemed to accuse me of glaring negligence.

"Well, you'd best get going." He stood and dusted off his britches and stretched his long muscles a bit. What! Didn't he see the empty pockets, the missing pieces, the obvious lack of preparation for what was on the other side? Mr. Henry just rumbled again and gave me a one-armed hug that nearly squashed all the air from my lungs.

"What is on the other side?" When I just stood there with my thinking loops a-whirling, he smiled and tapped me on the forehead. "It's just life. It's just the living. Don't go dying just to figure out what's on the other side of life."

Well, there you go. Now you've heard the tale exactly as it happened. On this bright, cold morning, it all seems a little like a dream. But I tell you what, if you are still awake at 3:00 am, with the evening news anchors droning their annoying muzak, and you just laying there wondering what in the heck you're going to do, get out your pack. Get out your pack and look through it. The American Dream is about the freedom to live, to be happy. What you've put in your pack all these years has less to do with getting there than it does about being here.

Fear and Anger Suit Up For the Game

So this week, Jeff and I were presented with a great opportunity. If you've known me long, you'll be groaning about now. All my life, my strongest desire has been to be a true part of a dynamic, effective, hard-working, happy team. Many people play out this same yearning by joining high school team sports, 4H or chess clubs, bible study and book clubs, professional associations, business partnerships, sororities and fraternities, even gangs. I have had some lovely memorable experiences but for the most part, my core need to be part of something glorious hasn't worked out so well. I have a pattern of going outwards, going for the dream, crashing, then turning inwards to slowly recover from the loss of potential bliss.

My friend Kara wrote a poignant note about this sort of rhythm: "I remembered that it isn't so much a circle as it is a spiral staircase. I come back 'round again and again to the same issues, but I'm usually up higher or down lower, the perspective is always a little different." I know this - you never step in the same stream twice. Each time I, or we as a family, step into a grand idea, we are a little more cautious, a little more aware.

I do know this. Intellectually. But emotionally and physically, when we were offered to step into the exact dream-come-true that we've imagined for so long, I headed straight for the tub of chocolate covered mints. I was edgy and irritable and couldn't sleep. Actually, I did sleep but had the most annoying old nightmares. Places and people and issues that I've long since analyzed to mush. Every single one of the worn-out fears begin or end with my total lack of understanding of why the terrible thing had happened and a complete inability to change the painful outcome. Intellectually, I knew this was ridiculous but couldn't seem to stop the reaction loop.

A very smart friend told me not to go to bed 'like normal'. Stay up late. Simple as that. And just like she had an angel accomplice, a new book dropped into my lap for the dark quiet hours. Thomas Cowan's book The Fourfold Path to Healing has much of the wisdom and practical information that I've come to build my life around during the last several years. Statements like: "...the quality of our food determines in large part the quality of our lives. And the quality of what we eat is determined by every step that goes into production and processing - the feeding of the animals, care of the soil, preservation, storage and even cooking methods" wrapped me up in their familiarity, letting me know that I was in the presence of a kindred spirit.

So when I got to the chapter on weight loss, I certainly did not expect revolutionary ideas. My defensive posture was totally relaxed when this passage snuck right in:

"It is ironic but true that the person who is overweight often has a very constricted personal space. When we learn to create an enlivened personal space, then the need to create a buffer of excessive fat between ourselves and the world becomes less...According to one popular book on the psychology of various diseases, overweight is an expression of oversensitivity, fear and anger, all of which result in a lack of ability to call on others for help."

Boy, does that seem right! I think it would be fair to extrapolate and say that many addictive, seemingly unconscious behaviors fit this same shielding reaction - alcohol, drugs, tv, sex, even silence. My pattern of hope and effort resulting in fear and anger with no chance of return to the "before the terrible thing happened" bliss had been triggered. My Automatic Eject Button had been pushed and my escape pod was fully stocked with fat-forming sugar shields.

We are definitely going for the wonderful opportunity. There was really never any doubt that we would. However, this time, fear and anger aren't hidden in the baggage compartment. I am scared - this project is what I've wanted my whole life, what I want to do for the rest of my life, and I'm terrified that it won't work. Perhaps the thing I fear most is not failure but anger. When bad things happen, it is human nature to lay blame, to get mad, to let the flame of anger burn away the disappointment and hurt. The central relationship this time, the newly forged team, is too precious to lose.

I can't say for sure what will happen. I can only trust myself and the wisdom I've earned by stepping in this stream so many times I've got webbed toes. This quote from The Fourfold Path to Healing finally called the meeting in my mind to order. Not one of the bad experiences, worst fears, or old wounds has to be dismissed, they'll all get to vote at the quarterly meetings until they finally feel their work is done. Thank you Joanie and Mr. Cowan.

"The word 'health' comes from the word 'whole.' In this holistic view, we can experience illness as an opportunity to generate spaces for transformation, create supportive rhythms and move towards balance. Symptoms of illness, then, are not enemies but friendly movements that guide us again towards wholeness. Constantly ignoring or, worse, suppressing the symptoms is like being lost and closing your eyes to warning signals and signposts. Creating spaces for 'wholing' to take place is an important step in allowing the processes of building up and tearing down to do their work. All these processes are spacial processes that require forms and rhythms for healing to occur. Healing involves re-balancing that which takes place in the spaces between formation and annihilation.

How to Be a Giant, Part One

It has taken me quite awhile to coherently articulate my reaction to Barack Obama being elected the 44th President of the United States. I am 100% cynical when it comes to our political process and those who rise to the top of that process. I would have enthusiastically voted for Ron Paul but couldn't bring myself to vote for either of the two representatives of the established political parties. I am sick of "politics as usual" and heard nothing new in either McCain's or Obama's platforms. However, I was fascinated by the play of story on election day and made sure my homeschooled lovelies watched the election coverage with me. This was part of the fabric of their childhood story after all.

And then, something happened. And for days afterward, the only clear sentence in the swirl of my reaction to the election was, "Something just happened."

As she so often does, my friend Kara over at MotherHenna began laying straight the fibers of my reaction. Kara walked me through her own story - and in doing so, I began to see that I, and we as a nation, had just walked through a gateway of Before and After.

In our Declaration of Independence, within the most often quoted passage in fact, lay our first institutional lie: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Indeed, further on in the same document, we get a hint that the Founding Fathers did not really mean ALL men as Jefferson cites the King's crimes including: "He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions." The dividing up of "Us" and "Them" was truly begun.

I was born in 1966. I have not seen the timespan of changes illustrated by President Elect Obama in his acceptance speech. I was born after the Fifteenth Amendment gave men of any color the right to vote. I was born after the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote. It wasn't until our nation walked through the Before/After gate of electing the very first non-white man as our President that the crashing effect of those institutional lies hit me. It wasn't enough that individual lives, personal stories across time and space had overcome that distinction of "for Us but not for Them" created and affirmed with the very document that declared our national commitment to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Our nation's birth announcement was just pretty words - like the studio portrait of a happy family that hides heinous sins of abuse and pain.

Kara's post keeps me walking though. Our Founding Fathers were individuals. All had their own personal stories of abuse and liberty. What they signed together as a group gave birth to a single being, the United State of America, made up of individuals all with their own personal stories. The Fifteenth Amendment makes no mention of Frederick Douglass nor does the Nineteenth Amendment mention Lucretia Mott. But without the unwavering personal stories of these Giants, the national lies may have remained even longer uncorrected.

In speaking about the privileges of her own life, Kara states:

"Now let me explain something. I was not born when the stage version of HAIR hit the scene. I was 8 years old when the film was released. My mom was not a hippy, but a single mother working as a Head Start teacher trying to make the ends meet. This phenomenon was not on my radar within the context of its own time.

It was not until the late 1980's, when as a college student at Carnegie Mellon University, I saw this film for the first time, screened for our critical theory class. This was not my reality. Rather, this was the myth of Giants. Yet, somehow the reality I had created around myself was due to the work of these mythic beings. My cultural reality, the context of my life was somehow in play because of the things these Giants did to fight for freedom."

It was the personal footsteps of all the Giants, both named and unrecognized who kept putting one foot in front of the other, living life according to what they knew to be most true that so has overwhelmed me in the last several days. As the cameras panned the huge, peaceful crowd in that Chicago park, I saw in those individual faces all the ancestors who had made this day possible. The gate of change was held open by them. And millions of individual Americans finally undid the Founding Fathers' institutional lie of "all men".

Now we are on the "After" side of the gate. Certainly I do not believe that the personal stories of all Americans have miraculously shifted to the possession of life, liberty, and happiness. I was not being casual when I stated that I was 100% cynical of the political process. I am however, 100% idealistic about the power of personal stories. I believe that we have finished a monumental task. Now we begin another. As Kara says so perfectly, "There is no magic bullet. Life as a human being doesn't get done or finish. We die. Our work becomes the Myth of Giants for those left living. But the re-creation of reality, the constant revision of life itself, this goes on, ceaselessly. Whatever "happy ending" we all though we were racing toward since the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, well, there is no ending. There is only beginning."

Another favorite blog writer, Sharon Astyk, sharpens this point:

"The man we have made President may or may not rise to the difficult circumstances he faces. I hope and pray he does. And whether he does in part depends on us. If we make it necessary, if we become great, well, perhaps he will follow. Or perhaps it won’t matter that much if he doesn’t.

"We are told over and over again that the American people will not sacrifice, that they are lazy, they lack courage, they are not the equals of the people who came before us and gave us pieces of a history worth believing in. I do not know what kind of president we have, but I know, if I know any thing in the world that that last is a slander, a lie.

Each of us has the capacity to become greater than we are at present, to invoke the power of past generations, and past acts of heroism, and become what we need to be - the people who will preserve an America worth loving. So far, most people still don’t quite realize what is needed, but I have faith that if we choose, we who have coasted on cheap energy and plenty of wealth will find in ourselves that we are not so very far removed from our past, and that we are tied in the soils and by our courage to a future worth having. I have hope that we can create an America and an American people so deeply worth loving that our current and future leaders are shaped and transformed and burnished in greatness, as we transform and burnish ourselves."

I offer one more quote from the man whose personal story will indeed be noted in the history books:

"And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright --tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.

For that is the true genius of America -- that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow."

I am a Giant. My husband is a Tall Tale. Our children's lives are Mythic. Each one of us are not only descendants of those with unimaginable tales of courage, pain, and triumph. We will be the Ancestors. And this is the most important job title of all. What reality, what American Dream will we craft for our children's children?