Happy New Year everyone.
Sun at Newgrange
Winter Solstice was celebrated in the British Isles in a very special way. Many of the great monuments were built to track the sun. Many of the mounds are oriented so that the sun enters their long entrance ways and illuminates their inner chamber on the solstice. The Winter Solstice represents the rebirth or rekindling of the light, the sun. This process reminds me of the conception of the Solar Hero, the Christ.
Here’s a site that shows the beginning of this process at Newgrange on December 18th.
Joanna Russ in Hospice Care
I had the privilege and honor of taking an advanced writing class with Joanna Russ at the University of Washington in Seattle. I was studying literature mostly, but took a few writing classes. Russ stood out as brave in that time of worship of “high literature” over popular or (God forbid) genre fiction. In addition to her excellent critiques, she gave sound advice about how to keep writing in a world in which we’d have to work full time for a while, if not for our adult lives. I remember her suggesting that we might want to take a job that didn’t consume our writing energy so we’d have that left to write during off hours. She suggested not writing junk fiction to make a living, as our “real” work would start to resemble it.
My two favorites of hers are in fiction, The Female Man, with four women who come from the worlds that embody the variety of gender roles often discussed in the 1970’s. Meet especially Jael, warrior with steel teeth and catlike retractable claws, from an earth with separate-and warring-female and male societies. But then there’s the librarian waiting to get married.
Her nonfiction is equally revolutionary. I loved How to Suppress Women’s Writing, published at a time when a male student said to me in all seriousness after class once that no woman had ever written a classic nor ever would. Yes, this was in the 20th century. I told him he was a moron and not to talk to me anymore.
Thank you Joanna Russ for all you have done for us—entertaining, teaching and clearing the way!
Mehler on Jeff Rense Show
Stephen Mehler, my favorite Egyptologist (actually Khemitologist, but more on that later) spoke to Jeff Rense about the Egyptian Revolution. Give it a listen if that flips your switch.
Congratulations to Egypt!
I’ve been so caught up watching the news about the Egyptian Revolution, that I didn’t discuss it on my website. Stephen Mehler leads tours to Egypt and I’ve been with him three times, plus live through all his comings and goings to Egypt each year. We are very close with a family in Nazlet El Saman, the village right next to the Sphinx and the Giza Plateau.
We were all inspired by the courage and persistence of the Egyptian people standing in Tahrir Square, finding ways to communicate with each other, switching from Facebook to Twitter to other sites, then back again to stay ahead of the Thought Police. They have succeeded! Congratulations!
Now we all hold them in our thoughts, we pay attention still, to be sure that opposition parties have time and freedom to organize, that free and fair elections they were promised do happen, that jobs are created for people who need to support their families.
Thank you, Egypt, for shining the light for the world and giving us all hope.
Broadly Speaking
Here’s the latest podcast from Broad Universe:
Welcome to the very first Broadly Speaking edition of the Broad Pod. Broadly Speaking brings you interviews and insights from women writers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror – and all the realms in between. Keeping with the Broad Pod’s theme of Faith and Fear, Broadly Speaking will chat with Jennifer Pelland, Morven Westfield, and Gail Z. Martin about how they’ve used faith and fear in their writing, advice on how to do it well, and even how selling and marketing can be affected. Join host Trish Wooldridge for some true tales of women’s adventures in writing!
Tucson Memorial
We watched the Tucson Memorial service last night because we knew it could be a moment of national healing, a moment where our hearts would be uplifted. And we were right.
One of Congresswoman Gifford’s staff talked about her healing process, how she’s there, bringing the same courage and expectation of progress to recovering from a brain injury that she brought to her work with her community and fellow Congress members.
Dr. Carlos Gonzales opened with a traditional prayer with the permission of his elders, bringing our Native American heritage front and center. He reminded us of our less than perfect beginning, but of how America struggles constantly to realize her dream. Intern Daniel Hernandez refused the label of hero. But perhaps a hero is an ordinary person doing what needed to be done. He reminded us of e pluribus unum, that out of many we become one.
President Obama spoke quietly of each victim in words that could almost have been whispered into the ears of family members, but that everyone needed to hear. He spoke of tragedy, but then he pointed to the hope—how people saved more from being killed, how people helped those who were injured, how people immediately moved toward healing. He called for us to remember that dream of perfecting our union, of remaking the world in its image, but not through the violence that has marred our history too often. He said “it’s important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds.” He challenged us to be as good and as deserving of respect as the child Christina Taylor Green thought we were. “I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it.”
The president of the University of Arizona ended with Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin’s “To the New Year.” The last lines reminded me of aging, oddly enough, of that dream we had as teenagers or young adults, when we were full of idealism and hope, marching for peace, for equality, for civil rights, for women’s rights. For that dream of a more perfect world, for justice. And now, forty years later, we see our nation in almost the same place, and yet not. Some of us have despaired. Some of us have given up. But Merwin’s words assure us that the dream is still there:
so this is the sound of you
here and now whether or not
anyone hears it this is
where we have come with our age
our knowledge such as it is
and our hopes such as they are
invisible before us
untouched and still possible
The dream we worked for is still there. Other generations worked for it in the past. Other generations have been born and taken up the vision. Everything is still possible.
Words Work
My condolences to the families of those who were killed in the shooting in Arizona, and prayers and positive thoughts for those still struggling to heal. As a writer, I can only marvel at people who advocate violence in their speeches and writings, then act surprised when it manifests. Words have power. Thoughts become actions. I watched the Kennedy brothers be assassinated, and King and other civil rights leaders, too. Let’s clean it up, people. Get conscious. Be honest.