Countdown to Kinshasa

The countdown is in full swing. Four days to go. Three more suitcases to take. Two songs to choose. One new assignment.

Four days to go. I’m right on track. Today I meet with my co-editors of the book of Congo stories to go over last questions and changes in the text and decide on a title. I will send the text off to the publisher before I go. I did a final round of shopping this week for gifts to take and to take care of my need to have something new to wear. 

Last-minute gifts: hair ornaments for little girls and gospel CDs by Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston. These plus everything from umbrellas to neckties to little toy cars that I bought in a shopping spree at Target a few weeks ago.

Last-minute clothes: It’s not that I had nothing to wear. I have enough long skirts to get by nicely but I saw this simple sleeveless long dress that will look great under my two jackets made of Congo cloth. I wear the jackets with pants here but women don't wear pants in Congo. Also, I’ve been wanting a track suit and that is good airplane wear. I found cool black stretchy pants and a lavender and black jacket, all for under $20 at JCP. Then I spent a morning shortening the sleeves and pants, including ripping seams because I was in a hurry. Never sew in a hurry. I made a jacket last weekend for my friend Cecilia, who was visiting with her husband. She’d bought this gorgeous material some time ago in Kenya and it required careful matching to get the design just right. I ended up sewing till the last minute (they had to leave to meet a plane) and shouting to her at one point, “Don’t talk to me!”

As for my paid work, I’m taking vacation since yesterday. Who has time for it? Joanna and little Hazel arrive today and Vic comes back this evening. The rest of the family arrive on Saturday and stay till sometime Sunday. Monday is for last minute packing and a pedicure (open toe season here we come!). I have to be at the airport in nearby South Bend at 2.

Three more suitcases. Some ex-Congo worker whom our friends know and trust wants to send three suitcases of stuff with the three of us. Is that okay? Well I guess. I’m told the owner of the suitcases will come to the airport to see them off. I’m already carrying a computer for the Congolese writer I’m meeting with next Thursday, Nina is taking a digital projector for Pastor François, from his daughter. People traveling to Congo are trade vehicles.

Two songs to choose. When you go to church as a visitor, performance is welcome. Pastor Nina is preaching twice (I hope I don’t have to translate). We can all sing. I just remembered yesterday that I promised my traveling companions that I’d choose some lively gospel favorites.

One new assignment. Write home to the churches who are sponsoring us. I might not have thought of this until my friend Vicki put in a request. Not everybody is on Facebook or reads our blogs. But email and posting of any kind will be iffy in the middle week of our stay, when we are with our Congolese hosts. 

Tim says maybe even don’t take computers. But I cannot be without my computer. I write, even if I don’t post or email.
 

A tick in the Earth's hair

This is Earth Day weekend. Yesterday I gathered nettles and garlic mustard to eat. Tomorrow I will do laundry because today it is raining, and I want to hang clothes out to dry. These are Earth Day kinds of things to do. But every day is Earth Day in these woods. How can it not be? I sometimes look up at the tall trees and feel like we are nestled in the Earth’s hair.

Think about that analogy, however, and you start feeling like a louse. Or a tick. Yes, a tick. This house, sitting here in its little cleared space, perhaps feels to Gaia like a fat tick that won’t let go. How annoying is that!

In any case, it’s a reminder to be as kind and respectful to our hostess as we can, given that we are parasites and utterly dependent on her.

I often feel like a fraudulent environmentalist, however, even though it is my profession. Last Sunday we encountered one of our younger friends who is a real environmentalist. He has hiked the Appalachian Trail. He has developed organic gardens. He has gotten a graduate degree in sustainable agriculture. He is looking for a place to till his own soil and live well but lightly on the land. He is fascinated by farming with horses. He is dedicated, persistent, and propelled by idealism and conviction. Gaia needs more 30-somethings like Jon.

Oddly, Jon seems to admire my husband and me, consider us mentors. I think it’s because I told him that I once spent a weekend with Wendell Berry, the poet-essayist elder of all things sustainable. On Berry’s Kentucky farm. Talking around his kitchen table. With half a dozen other people who were real environmentalists.

I’m not sure what I think a real environmentalist is or should be, just that it’s not my husband and me. We’re not exactly living off the grid out here in the woods. We have to drive everywhere. Vic still drives to Chicago to work in the middle of every week. Working for an environmental organization is not a be-all and end-all calling for me. I have other interests as well, and I could work in another profession.

But who we really are, my husband and I, is ordinary middle-class people who have come gradually to consciousness about, and love for, Mother Earth. Vic would not call himself an environmentalist but he reads incessantly about climate change—and has since the 1980s. I hesitate to call myself an environmentalist but I have worked for an environmental organization for 12 years because I love the people in this little band (real environmentalists) and what they are doing, and because they really put my writing and editing skills to good use. I admire them, like Jon admires me. I have learned from them and I keep learning. If I am an environmentalist now, I give them all the credit.

And I do love the Earth—I have since I was a child growing up on the farm. And I love foraging in her “hair” for wild edibles and, in the process, grooming the invasive plants off her scalp. I love the wildflowers that spring up every year far more than I love flowers I plant myself. I love these trees that surround me, indulging my presence.

It’s all about love, justice, and truth, which I am passionate about. Perhaps Gaia needs more people like us, as well as like Jon. I believe there are many more people like us than there were even a decade ago, and that there will be many more among our children and grandchildren. People who love the Earth and try to do well by her without thinking twice about it.

The joy of finishing

Unable to get back to sleep after awaking at 3 with chest pain, which turns out to be heartburn from making a supper out of popcorn, I come down to make myself a cup of tea. The kitchen is a disaster. How can it be such a mess when I haven’t been cooking? Why is that chicken bone on the floor? Oh. The cat must have jumped up on the kitchen island where those bones have been idling since I made a fast sandwich out of leftover chicken for yesterday’s lunch.  And there are the remains of my breakfast, and dinner of the evening before, because, while I haven’t been cooking, I have been eating. Throwing things together and into my mouth.

The state of the kitchen island—dirty tea cups, the unsqueezed half of a lemon, the malaria tablets for my upcoming trip ($148 for 22 days!), the popcorn popper, the popcorn bag, the popcorn salt, olive oil, empty blood orangeade bottle (quite yummy—Meijer), that plate of chicken bones, and much, much more—is the cumulative result of not putting anything away or cleaning anything up—nothing—for two days. No wonder the cat took advantage of the chaos.

Two observations. Well, three.

1) One person can make a lot of mess.

2) The mess of a person alone is greater than the mess of two people because one person alone has no shame.

3) This is what happens when I’m finishing a project. My study is in a similar state. Papers everywhere. Scribbles everywhere on them. But I am done—DONE!—with the Congo story book.

For the last two days I have had tunnel vision, ignoring the chaos gathering around me, because I have seen the light at the end of that tunnel. I could feel, taste the project finally coming together. I had all the material. I was translating and editing the last stories but I still wasn’t sure how I would organize it. I’d been thinking for a long time there would be two parts—pre-independence and post-independence—but, although the events of 1960 and thereafter cut a decisive slice through the stories, people’s lives don’t divide themselves up that way. And then I was thinking three parts, and then suddenly knew how I would organize it, and there would be four parts.

With that, everything fell more or less into place. All I had to do was line up the stories in the right order—I spent the first tunnel-vision day doing this—and then go through and do a final proofing-tweaking-consistency edit of the whole collection. I got that done much faster than I thought, also in a single day. When 6 pm rolled around yesterday, time to go to yoga, I was only 20 pages from the finish line so I disobeyed my body’s commands and followed my heart, stayed home, and finished the 67,000-word manuscript.

Waking at 3 with chest pain, worrying that I had thrown a clot into my lungs from sitting too long at my desk—was the price. Really, it was heartburn.

I even came up with title candidates, a last step. Sometimes early titles help shape the material but sometimes they shape it too much. For this one, I wanted the stories to tell themselves before naming the book. I have to get the consensus of my co-editors—those who conceived and shepherded the project before I got my hands on it—but my favorite title candidate so far is The Jesus Tribe: Stories of Congo’s Mennonites, 1912–2012.

Eating nettles

Yummy woods nettles with a companion trillium

Before I shopped for a dinner party Saturday night and an Easter potluck the next day I went out into the woods and harvested a big bag of woods nettles. They were featured in both meals.

When I tell people I’m serving them nettles, I get a variety of reactions. The most common is, “Are you sure they won’t sting? How did you learn they were edible? What do they taste like?” A few people refuse to try them. A few wild food enthusiasts say, “Oh goody!” It was such a friend, Mark Liechty, who introduced me to them. And some born and bred city folks say, “What are nettles?”

Most people seem to be converts after the first taste. Here are my secrets to nettles cuisine:

1)   Use only woods nettles. These are much tastier than the ditch nettles, which, as far as I am concerned, taste exactly like what they are: weeds. You can distinguish the kinds by where they grow—woods nettles grow only in woods, though often in disturbed areas. Regular nettles grow in more open spaces. They look different.

Not so yummy ditch nettles.

2)   Harvest them when they first come up, which is right now this year in Michigan but several weeks later most years. They are best when the shoots are just unfolding or when all the leaves are still clustered near the top. Wear rubber gloves! Snip them off with scissors, including a few inches of stem. (You can harvest them later if you take just the tips but it’s a big hassle. You have to wear full protective gear even in the summer because any brush with the plant hurts a lot for about 5 minutes.)

3)   I wear protective gear when harvesting the shoots as well, not against the little plants but against ticks.

4)   Wash them in several waters, again wearing gloves or using utensils to avoid touching them though they usually don’t sting after they’re wet.

5)   Steam them in a little water just until they wilt and are bright green. If you cook them too long they will disintegrate. We’re talking minutes. Brave a taste! The stems should have a bit of resistance but not be tough.

6)   Toss them with salt, pepper, and olive oil.

7)   Do not try this with poison ivy.

You can also sauté nettles briefly and use them in omelets, or put them in soup, but I prefer the unadulterated greens. Woods nettles are sweet as spinach without the oxalic acid. On Saturday I told Congolese guests that I thought nettles tasted like the greens we had in Africa called lenga-lenga. They agreed and asked for seconds and thirds of “lenga-lenga.”

Do less, part 2

I just finished another funny little cartoon movie about a serious environmental topic. My Son the Radiologist introduced me to the technology a few months ago and we have both been playing with it.

A note comes from Peter, beloved environmental elder and former chairman of my organization’s board: “This is wonderful. I do believe you have found your medium. Please do more and more and more.”

This is true. I have found my medium. Little skits and cartoons. Who knew?

I have done and tried to do much bigger things but the emerging theme for me is one that I learned from My Daughter the Feldenkrais Practitioner: Do less. I have an uneasy relationship with ambition. On the one hand, I recognize that because women of my generation were never encouraged to do much at all, we have a duty to make the most of our gifts. On the other hand, although I have successfully pushed my own envelope and that of other women, ambition sets a trap for me. It can get in the way of my truth.

Pardon me while I navel gaze intensely for a moment but parts of this may speak to you.

I have to hold lightly this new discovery about my knack for cartooning because the ego would like to make a whole new career path out of it. Ego would put significance ahead of the truth. “Significance” says this is a way to get important information out—stress important. Truth says that I have a natural gift of humor and a way with words plus intelligence and goodwill—none of which I am responsible for but all of which can be cultivated and can be of service.

My truest path is to be of service. Others can and must be ambitious. That doesn’t work for me. Yes, I push my comfort zone but the moment I do so because I think I should, rather than as a joyful exploration of possibilities, I run into ego. The ego wants to make more, more, more of things.

Even with the little cartoons I see this happening. What? Only 87 hits on my first one? Nobody has sent the second one out to their Facebook friends? Sandra hasn’t responded to it? I did it for her!

The reason I have come to hate persuasion/promotion activities, and yet inevitably get involved in them, is because I have gifts related to the essence of persuasion but I can’t exercise them without getting tangled up in my ego. There is a push-pull that leaves me emotionally exhausted. I not only want to do the work I can do; I want it to work. And when it doesn’t seem to work in the way I think it should I get disappointed, feel sorry for myself, and give up. These are ego responses. Wanting response is an ego response.

Still, response is important. Peter’s response was important. Being of service means responding to needs, occasions, people, and triggering response of some kind, often the same kind. It is a dance back and forth, keeping in touch with the wellsprings of joy in oneself and the response from others, without being too touchy about the former or too dependent upon the latter.

But the recurring motto for me seems to be, Do less. (See my post from last year.) Take everything I have learned and do small things with it, not big things. Throw a spontaneous dinner party for visiting Congolese. Write Bible story skits for church. Make funny little cartoon movies about serious environmental topics. Go back, as a mature woman, to a country where you lived when you were young and didn’t fully know yourself. Teach a friend how to make a simple jacket out of beautiful cloth. Keep learning from your children. Keep in touch with the unfolding personality of your precious grandchild. Write a blog, not a book.

I can think of ways to enlarge each of these things, to expect more of them and extract more from them, to take them to the next step, to reach more people, yada yada. But that quickly translates into “should.” After a lifetime of “should” I want to step back from that, to discipline myself to hew close to the truth.

The mind and its occupiers

I start to meditate and immediately think about stretching the dining room table out to its full length to see if I could get 15 chairs around it. Do I even have 15 chairs? Is it even right to have a dinner party on Holy Saturday? But I agreed to host unexpected Congolese visitors that evening and I invited people who will be interested in what they have to say about events in Eastern Congo—hence the 15 chairs. I open my eyes and check email and respond to a friend’s latest prayer request. Really, I am waiting for 9 o’clock to roll around so I can call the clinic and speak to someone about my prescription.

I try meditating again and a phrase comes through: "the occupied mind." My mind has been invaded by all these thoughts and, though that is part of being human, I wonder about the nature of a truly unoccupied mind. Is such a mind just blank or is it liberated? And if so, is it essential for anything? I try meditating again.

This time I experience a few moments of actual blankness. A few trivial thoughts pass through and I let them go. Then come some images that I entertain for a few moments before releasing them:

1) The improv rehearsal yesterday in which three men inhabit the roles of bereaved disciples early on Easter morning. My husband is among them. He is the first to let himself fully into the grief, anger, and guilt of the moment. The other two catch on and soon it is as if these three 21^st Century men are back there in the shadow of the execution of their leader. I love this. I love them for doing this.

2) The beloved granddaughter screwing up her face as she bites into an asparagus stalk. Discards it. Picks it up again, bites again, screws up her face, smiles, and says, “Um!”

Then comes a long, truly blank period. My computer announces “9 hours.” I do not open my eyes. When I do I have a deep peace, an image of the mind’s order, and an unformulated sense of one reason for meditation. It is not to get rid of all occupying thoughts but to penetrate through the layers. Let me try to formulate this.

At the top layer of the mind are the preoccupations—the occupying thoughts that jump up and down waving their hands for attention. Sometimes you just have to stop and see what they want. Sometimes you can tell them to wait, you’ll deal with them later. As long as they are elbowing each other out for your attention, however, you will never get beyond this superficial level.

At the second level is a reality, one that is important but that was crowded out by the earlier images. It may deserve some time and attention. It is an important occupier. Today my reality was love, two images of love. Another day it may be a sadness, a grief. The reality, the truth, is connected with an emotion. At this level you experience the emotion. Insights float through at this level. Questions rise in it. (Like “What is an unoccupied mind good for?”)

At the third level is the blankness that allows the mind and body to expand into unity with both the emotion and what is beyond, the universe that holds it. This is the unoccupied mind. I need to get in touch regularly with the unoccupied mind, not to banish all occupiers from it forever but to keep the orderly link among all these levels. And to experience that wordless connection with the Source of it all.