When A Journey Chooses You

My weekly reflections on Journey continues…...

(For background, refer to January 3 entry.)

Who comes to mind when you think of a hero? Anyone like this?

credit: Study.com

This little guy surfaced when I googled "heroes examples." Not quite what I had expected, but I like him! He's dressed the stereotypical part - weapons at the ready - even a coordinated vest and cape outfit. But the detail that appeals to me most is the expression on his face. Can you see his mouth? It's tilted in an "I'm-not-too-sure-about-this" kind of way. And his eyes, one slightly higher than the other. If we could see his eyebrows, one would be elevated. Unsure. Maybe even frightened. But, there he stands.

Joseph Campbell - American author, scholar, mythologist - published a book in 1949 (new edition in 2008) titled, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.


He writes of the "hero's journey," a pattern found throughout world mythologies, in which an archetypal hero follows three basic steps: Departure, Initiation, Return. Star Wars' creator, George Lucas, relied heavily on Campbell's work. His main character, Luke Skywalker, an unlikely hero himself, set out on a personal quest and ended up saving the Galaxy.

Photo credit: BBC

In a recent TED Radio Hour (December 18, 2015) broadcast, "The Hero's Journey," four speakers shared their unique experiences as journeyers. One was Dame Ellen MacArthur. In 2005 she became the fastest person to circumnavigate the globe, in a sailboat, nonstop, solo. Twenty-six thousand miles in 71 days, 14 hours, 18 minutes, 33 seconds.


A monumental and heroic accomplishment, to be sure; but it was a comment she made at the end of her talk that captured my attention even more.

…"You're not brave to take on something you choose. I think real bravery is taking on something that you don't choose like young people in recovery from cancer or leukemia or, you know, people who lose a close friend. You then have to deal with something that you have no idea how to deal with - you cannot in any way prepare for. And, for me, they're the heroes. And they're the unsung heroes, but they're the heroes."

Three friends of mine have recently begun journeys, not of their own choosing. Two lost husbands to cancer, another to an accident. The Departure stage of their journeys was unplanned - no time to put on armor, grab the sword, outfit a yacht with supplies for 71 days, or plan a personal quest. Perhaps they feel somewhat like our little hero with the red cape. Yet, like him, they show up. And take steps forward, day by day, with uncommon bravery and strength.

Heroines of their own journeys!!  

Ann, Jan and Mary Beth

      

 

A Blog Awakens

I've been writing a blog for almost six years, in Moscow and now New York City. My postings have drifted farther apart in the last few months as I have devoted more time to writing my book, Labyrinth Journeys ~ 50 States, 51 Stories, about my two-year journey to walk a labyrinth in each state and interview its creator -- all women. The writing continues, with a goal for completion of the draft by April 1st (no April Fool's joke intended.)

I've recently considered discontinuing the blog altogether. My heart just hasn't been in it. Until this morning. I was listening to The Writer's Almanac, as I do every morning as I put on my make-up, when Garrison Keillor began talking about Lucretia Mott.

 "This day in 1793, Lucretia Mott was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts. She quit her job as a teacher at a Quaker boarding school near Poughkeepsie, New York when she found that she was being paid less than half of what the male teachers all made, simply because she was a woman. The experience sparked her first interest in women's rights. In 1848 she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the first convention for women's rights in Seneca Falls, New York.
It was Lucretia Mott who said, 'The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation, because in the degradation of women, the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.' "

The day Lucretia chose to step away from her job, she stepped toward something greater. She began her own journey.

Journey. The idea captivates me! It captivates me more each day as I sit at my computer and write about another woman's journey… and contemplate my own. I pay closer attention when people share their stories. I even watched The Force Awakens with new eyes. Where is Luke in his journey? Is Rey's journey following a similar path?

By the time Mr. Keillor's soothing voice had read the final Poem for the Day, I had a plan.

I will continue the blog - weekly - on Mondays. I will write about Journey. Perhaps someone's journey, or about Journey itself. I will see what surfaces, and for how long. A journey is ever-changing.

Please join me.

Today, I begin by thanking you, Lucretia.
For the journey you began for women's rights over 200 years ago.
I wonder, though...what did you learn about yourself on the journey?

Lucretia Mott (painting by Joseph Kyle - 1842)

A Face of Peace

I originally posted this story on September 11, 2012. In light of the increased, disturbing rhetoric against Muslims, I am re-posting it. My hope is that as unknown faces become known, peace - rather than distrust and fear - will spread throughout our world.

Mohammed Azziz

A Face of Peace

I had never met a Mohammed before.  I had never met a Muslim before.  Living in small Arkansas towns for 36 years, then Alaska for 11 more, the chances were slim that I would have crossed paths with one. Then in 2000 Drew and I accepted jobs at Cairo American College and spent the next four years living in Egypt, a country where approximately 85% of the population is Muslim.  

Mohammed Azziz was the first Mohammed I encountered.  I remember naively thinking, “He must be very special to have the same name as THE Mohammed.” As I gradually met more Egyptian men teaching and working at the school, driving taxis, selling souvenirs, delivering groceries, and parenting students in my 2^nd grade classroom, I quickly deduced that at least one out of every three Egyptian males must be named Mohammed.  Sharing a name with thousands didn’t make “my” Mohammed any less special.

We had been in Egypt for less than 24 hours when I walked into my new classroom.  I had spent most of the night before, wide awake, at our dusty kitchen table scribbling the same question across my journal pages, “What have we done!?” As I sat in a jet-lagged Twilight Zone, surrounded by a jumble of desks and boxes of books, Mohammed, the custodian for the 2^nd grade classrooms, opened the door.  In his 25 years at CAC, he had surely seen this pitiful sight before - a teacher new to the country, new to the school - close to tears.

“Mrs. Twylla,” (which sounded more like Mrs. Shwylla), “I am Mohammed. Welcome to Egypt." He  extended his hand and smiled, the same glad-to-be-alive smile that I never saw Mohammed without. Until 9/11.

We worked together that day, hanging blue and yellow bulletin board paper, arranging desks, sweeping, dusting, stacking books, creating a space for children to learn and grow.  For the rest of the year, Mohammed greeted me every morning, cleaned my classroom every afternoon. We learned about each other’s families. He taught me an Arabic word each day and, like Professor Henry Higgins (though more gently), asked me to repeat and repeat until correct.  My favorite expression was the one I heard him say whenever anyone needed his help, “Moofishmooshkala,” “No problem.”

I was writing the day’s schedule on the board, the first day of school after 9/ll, when I heard the door open. Mohammed entered.  Pale, solemn, shoulders sagging. He walked directly to me, took my hands in his, and with tears in his eyes, looked into mine.  “Mrs. Twylla, I’m so sorry what happened to your country.  It’s crazy people, crazy people.”  

I nodded. “I know, Mohammed, I know,” the only words to escape before sobs swallowed the rest. Sobs of loss…. and overwhelming hope.

The Anne Frank Tree in Arkansas

I've read Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl three times, climbed the steps to the Secret Annex at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, toured and written about The Anne Frank Center USA in Lower Manhattan. A copy of the book sits on my writing desk in Arkansas, among other books that inspire me.

In short, I'm a huge admirer of a girl who died 70 years ago, at the age of fifteen. A girl no one would have ever heard of, if her diary pages had not been discreetly scooped up by Miep Gies, one of the "helpers" who hid Anne, her family and another from the Nazis. One of the Gestapo who stormed their hiding place on August 4, 1944, emptied Anne's father's briefcase of "valuables," dumping her diaries - two years of her writing - on the floor. For many people, those discarded pages have become the most personal and compelling account of the Holocaust they will ever encounter.

During the two years in hiding, Anne shared an intimate relationship with only one thing outside the confines of the Annex, a tree. A white horse chestnut that grew in the courtyard outside the attic window. She wrote of it often in her diary. Among my favorite entries...

AP photo/Peter Dejong

"Nearly every morning I go to the attic to blow the stuffy air out of my lungs, from my favorite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind. As long as this exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts I cannot be unhappy." February 23, 1944 

"Anne's Tree" survived her by 65 years, blown over in a rainstorm in 2010, after being weakened by moth/fungus infections. Before it died, visionaries at the Anne Frank House gathered chestnuts, germinated them and developed a plan to donate its saplings "to memorialize incidences of intolerance and discrimination across the United States and around the world… and tell a greater story of surmounting the obstacles of discrimination of any kind." 

Eleven saplings were designated for planting in the United States.  Little Rock, Arkansas is the only city to receive two. One at Central High School, site of the Little Rock Integration Crisis in 1957…


and the other at the Clinton Presidential Center.

I visited the Clinton Center last week, 45 minutes from our home in Arkansas, where President Clinton  helped dedicate the permanent installation on October 2. The sapling (temporary substitute while the "real" one is acclimating in a local greenhouse) stands in the center, with a picture of Anne in the foreground. 

    

She is flanked by two glass panels, etched with her words on the left and President Clinton's on the right. Three glass panels complete the illusion of a house, of containment, confinement. They stand witness to Anne's story and tell their own.         

Chief Heckaton - hereditary chief of the Quapaw during the Arkansas Indian Removal of 1830 (Trail of Tears) 
Melba Patillo Beals - one of the Little Rock Nine (African American students denied entry to all-white Central High School) 
George Takei - actor and activist (confined to Rohwer Relocation Center, Japanese internment camp, in southeastern Arkansas during WW II). 

Victims of intolerance, discrimination, hatred, prejudice.
Like Anne.
Like millions of others.

As I walked away from the exhibit, a man took my place, followed by a couple, soon to be joined by a tour group at the far side of the parking lot. 

One sapling, many voices, plead for us… to listen. 

                                                                      ************   

The Sapling Project, sponsored by the Anne Frank Center USA, launched Confronting Intolerance Today in 2013, highlighting "innovative approaches to combating intolerance." Particular areas of focus are "hate crimes, combating prejudice, tolerance and the rule of law and LGBT rights."  

   





     



  
  








 

ddd

John Symons, A Voice of Peace

John Symons, a dear friend of ours, died recently. 

John and Ann Symons, Victory Day
Moscow, Russia - 2008

We met John and his wife, Ann, in Juneau, Alaska - over twenty-five years ago - when we all worked for the Juneau School District. We knew them, then, more in short greetings, "Hi, nice to see you. How are things going?" than in conversations. It wasn't until Drew, as director of the Anglo-American School of Moscow/St. Petersburg, asked Ann to interrupt her retirement and come to Russia as upper school librarian, that our relationship deepened. John came along as "Supportive Spouse," having retired a few years earlier. Ann's two-year contract at AAS extended, year by year, to six -- as ours did to seven.

In a city of 13 million, give or take a few million, we spent more time with Ann and John in Moscow than we ever did in the midst of Juneau's 30,000. Expatriate life tends to do that, bring people together quickly and cement them cohesively, in the absence of family and familiarity. The casual grocery store greeting in Alaska developed into toasts of friendship over Thanksgiving tables in Russia.

At our home in Arkansas this week, I found the basket of paper cranes John gave us.  He folded thousands of them during our time together in Moscow, pulling a square of origami paper from his bag whenever he had an idle moment.  The crane became, for John, an outward symbol of the cause he carried so passionately within -- peace.






I remember the day he opened his bag and gave handfuls of cranes to students….

John, Ann, Drew and I were chaperoning a group of AAS high school students on a trip to Egypt. On a ten-hour bus ride from Cairo to Siwa Oasis, a town about 30 miles east of the Libyan border, we stopped at El Alamein museum and cemetery. As adults, we knew little about the World War II battles that were fought in the heat and desolation of the North African desert. The students knew even less. They listened respectfully to the guide explain strategies and point out troop movements with his pointer, but we could see the "Why did we come here?" expression in their faces.

It wasn't until we stopped at the Commonwealth Cemetery that they began to make human connections… because of John. As each student stepped off the bus onto sand, he handed her/him an overflowing handful of paper cranes. "Place these on graves, and as you do, read the names and ages of the soldiers," he said. The students walked slowly, quietly among rounded headstones, reading. Within minutes, the tan landscape was dotted with color.

"They were so young."
"One soldier was only three years older than me."
"They died so far from home."
"What did they die for?"

--- reflections in journal entries shared by students

*******

Wanting to remember and honor John in some meaningful way, I selected a blue crane from the basket this morning and took it to the labyrinth in our yard. As I entered and circled toward the center, I thanked John for his devotion to peace, his voice of reason, for the good he brought into this world. I left it at the entrance, beside the cairns. Whether it decides to stay and dissolve into the earth, or fly away, its spirit of peace will spread…..along with John's.

NOTE:  Shortly after posting this story, I received an email from Ann. Another of their friends - Holly Pruett - in Portland, Oregon, also, posted a story about John and his paper cranes on her blog -- today!
Serendipity, indeed!!









      







       

An Afternoon at the Met with John Singer Sargent

In New York City - like anywhere else - it's easy to stay home on a Sunday afternoon. Clean the apartment, catch up on email, or fall asleep as that book you've been wanting to read slips out of your hands onto the floor. All admirable options. But then, there's that brochure from The Metropolitan Museum of Art on the table, the one that's been laying around all week. The one announcing the final two weeks of the "Sargent's: Portraits of Artists and Friends" exhibit. The Metropolitan Museum of Art!! It's a forty- five minute subway ride + walk away. I haven't been there in months.

What am I waiting for?

I enter the first exhibition room to find each painting encircled by at least five people, who have apparently asked themselves the same question. Some listen to audio guides, others read commentaries beside paintings, while a few quietly whisper comments to a companion. We all patiently wait our turns for the coveted spot in front of the next piece. If we bump a bag or brush against a hand poised to take a picture, we say a polite, "Excuse me," and move on.

John Singer Sargent,  Self-Portrait (1886)

John Singer Sargent received high praise during his own lifetime, but would undoubtedly be complimented by such reverent admirers, ninety years after his death. He is often referred to as "the leading American portraitist of his generation"(1856-1925). I'm unfamiliar with portrait painters who came before or after, but I can scarcely imagine any more gifted. Examples in the Met exhibit include:

Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau)

Carolus-Duran (one of Sargent's teachers)

William Butler Yeats

As admirers, we each pause longer in front of one painting than another, for reasons we might be hard-pressed to explain. Is it the subject, the technique, an expression or setting? Or a feeling, perhaps.

 I stopped at each of the ninety-two paintings, and returned to two.

A Gust of Wind

The first was a portrait of a woman - not seated in a chair, or posed as a statue - but on the move, outdoors, holding her hat in place as she strides through the grass. I want to know her story. Where is she going, and might I tag along? The commentary describes it as "one of Sargent's most daring compositions - freely painted and boldly abbreviated." Perhaps his subject was equally daring to move beyond a life of expectations.

The second could have been voted "The Most Unlikely To Get A Second Notice." It is unfinished.

Woman and Collie

A dog with his kind face and tongue hanging out; a faceless woman bending forward -- a friend, mistress, stranger? With only a few brushstrokes, Sargent began a portrait of companions, then "abandoned the composition before completing it." No reason why. He has left us to continue their story. As a writer, I'm intrigued by the challenge… yet more intrigued by Sargent's ability to capture my imagination, by what he has left undone.

I'm almost out the museum's front door when I turn around. I reach in my purse for my credit card, then walk to the membership desk. "I'd like to renew my membership, please."

 Next time, it's….

American Quilts and Folk Art
Ancient Egypt Transformed
Celebrating the Arts of Japan
Or
Or
Or





  

    

     

    

My Labyrinth - Finished!

My labyrinth is finished!! 

A year after I dug the first trench and laid the first brick, it's finished. Those of you who read my blog postings last summer, "My OWN labyrinth," Parts One and Two, probably assumed that it was finished long ago, that I have been peacefully walking it ever since. I had assumed as much myself. But then came the August morning when I spent forty-five minutes unearthing two hulking rocks, only to discover a network of entrenched tree roots underneath. I threw my shovel in the air, plopped down on one of the rocks, and reached for my phone.
"So, Ben, what was your plan, again?" I asked our son-in-law who had tactfully suggested an alternative to my dig-a-trench method earlier in the planning process.
Without a hint of "I-told-you-so" in his voice, Ben outlined the plan that I was, by then, more than happy to embrace.
No more digging!

Eight months passed. Eight months when the ground lay quiet, when I quieted myself. My initial drive to "get this done now" and "my way" gradually calmed, much like my breathing during meditation. In the mindfulness that followed, I realized what - in my haste - I had forgotten... the two most important elements I wanted my labyrinth to represent. Peace and community.

As dogwood and redbud bloomed and green replaced brown, my family and I set a date, April 11th. Ben calculated amounts. I researched sources and ordered supplies.

9 yards of topsoil

1165 bricks (Did I mention that Ben majored in math?)

 

155 rolls of Bermuda sod

                                                    Then the creation began!

Clearing away the remnants of Plan A, then tilling (Drew)

Schlepping (son Jason)

Measuring ( Jason, Ben and grandchildren Luke and Ruby)

Laying bricks (Ben, Jason and I)

                                           

Adding the last piece of sod - Done!

Cutting and placing sod

     

                                                           

















When I open our bedroom blinds in the morning, I look down on the completed labyrinth. It waits for me to walk. As I place one foot in front of the next, I remember a husband's enduring support, a grandchild's hands, a son's strength, a son-in-law's vision, a family's love. And I whisper, "Thank you!"