Confessions of an unrepentant rebel ... .

Those last two posts are wildly speculative -- rash, maybe even unreasonable, but it was only after sleeping on the idea for several nights, I decided to just go for it,

When these ideas first occurred to me, it was at a time when I was living among classical academics as a faculty wife at the University of California, Berkeley.  Our home was an informal gathering place for many of the "great minds" at a time following the Sixties conscious-raising period; after the assassinations of Dr. King, the Kennedys, Malcolm X, the resistance to the de-segregation of the public schools, and the birth of the Human Potential Movement with Werner Earhardt and EST, Fritz Perls and Charlotte Selvers at Esalan -- the new "Valhalla."  We were a part of all of it.

It was in that setting that I was introduced to Tarthang Tulku, Rinpoche, and Tibetan Buddhism.  To long mind-altering weekends in retreats at Padma Ling or Odiyon, the beautiful Monastery high above the Russian River in Sonoma County.  To the cutting edge of the explorations of the physicists who were exploring the interface between eastern religious thought and the western sciences.  And, no, I didn't practice Buddhism, though Bill was a serious student of both, and of Tibetan Buddhism, specifically.

It was in those years that my life had been impacted by -- not only the Civil Rights Revolution and rising black nationalism -- but by the likes of the irreverent and colorful author, Ken Kesey, and UU ministers, Aron Gilmartin, Paul Sawyer, and Starr King School for the Ministry president, Bob Kimball.

It was into that melange of exciting change that I was dropped unceremoniously through my somewhat hasty and impulsive marriage to Dr. William Soskin.

It was a heady time of redefinition.  We were all so open to change, and so vulnerable to possible mis-steps.  Fortunately, the experience was mostly at a time of exciting positive growth.

After 35 years of marriage and motherhood in an entirely different social environment, here I was in a world with as much to learn as to teach -- and in a social setting conducive to both.  I was re-building a life after a painful divorce, but on the cusp of rejuvenation for the second half.

Leni Riefenstahl's amazing photo book had arrived as a Christmas gift that year at a time when I was still in the throes of personal redefinition.  I was redefining myself as a black person in an almost totally white world; no small task.  Re-definining myself out of Suburbia, the Black community, and into University life.  Testing my ability to move out of my racial identity and into my "universal" self.

The Village of Kau was instrumental in achieving that transformation.  However, these images deepened my racial identity, markedly, and helped me to develop a greater understanding of where the human differences lie, and a better sense of when I was operating from "inside the circle" and when I was not.  And the awakening of an ability to demand acceptance not despite those differences, but because of them.  

Left Brain/Right Brain theories were commonplace as a subject of conversation in my new world where boundaries were being crushed against the walls of the New Age.  I was a witness to psychedelic experimentation and the fast-approaching Information Age would be upon us soon. Those big brains who were peopling my world at that time were busily creating the "New Age."


Those last two posts have been lying dormant in my brain for decades.  It was raised during that time of redefinition -- when I was having to 'splain and justify my existence in this new world of the Academy when there were no academic underpinnings to support me there.  I'd never attended college, though surely was an avid reader over a lifetime.  I'd arrived at the halfway point of my life with curiosity ablaze!

It was this Right Brain orientation that explained (to me, at least) the vast differences between Eastern and Western development.  The Lamas, refugees from the Chinese takeover of Tibet were moving in and out of our lives on a regular basis, and contact between our home and Katmandu was a common occurrence.  To those Lamas, mental telepathy was an ordinary usable tool.  To the western scientists the practice was still a mere unprovable but tantalizing theory.

Those fascinating brain theories explained some major differences in the social development of African Americans who had been forced to live under slavery for nearly 300 years while completely out of context of what would be "natural."  Maybe it would take another 300 years to regain the threads upon which black life was based.

I was relatively silent in the eighties at a time when I was surrounded by those big brains, and too unsure to express such revolutionary thoughts aloud (except to Bill, who humored me).

Then I watched Panther and the work of Ryan Coogler, and it all came rushing back.

Found myself dreaming of what might have been ... of all of the potential greatness snuffed out by poverty and injustice; by need and brutality, by deprivation and denial; by expropriation and exploitation ... .

Went to my living room book shelves a few days ago, to dig out the Riefenstahl book, and in thumbing through those extraordinary photos, began to cry!  All of it came rushing back, Bill, those brunches in our Berkeley home at the top of Grizzly Peak Boulevard where the original thinkers who were pushing us into a future rife with opiates and imagination (and, no, I never succumbed to drug use or Tibetan Buddhism) -- and the excitement of those times descended with a dizzying force.

Spent most of the day on Sunday re-living those fantasies, and reveling in the headiness of it -- headiness that I'd not allowed myself in those years; the headiness of daring to speculate and let the intellectuals prove me wrong.

I'll just put it out there.

... out there for others to argue against or build upon.

Prove me wrong, if you can, but know that as I approach my 97th birthday, I intend to only speak (and write) in declarative sentences!  Go on, give it your best shot ...

Maybe this is one way in which new pathways into inquiry are discovered.

There was this crazy man who insisted that the earth was not flat ... remember?

Wondering if I've taken on more than I can extricate myself from ... ?

Yet, it's too late to back out now.  The Grim Reaper could appear almost at any moment, and I might have failed to make my case:

(it may be helpful to read the last post, below, before reading this one.)

So I'll continue:

These masks have always fascinated me, ever since I ran across Riefenstahl's remarkably exciting coffee table book back in a time before the millennium.  I was fascinated when reading the description of her  visits to the Village of Kau every two years for many years, and that she'd studied the villagers at a time long before their rain forest settlement had been invaded by European forces (scientists, archeologists, anthropologists), and long before the influences brought with them began to drastically erode the culture.

I remember tears of sadness when reading that within about 3 years after this book was published, she'd returned to Kau to find those lovely black bodies clothed in Levis, and most of the brilliant cultural effects muted by western "civilizational" overrides.

I was married to Bill Soskin at that time, my brilliant psychologist husband, when I first met the people of Kau through this amazing book, and doing so strongly influenced the way I began to view black culture.  I remember -- while analyzing some data gathered by Bill's research project with which I worked at the University -- that maybe we were a Right-Brained people being test-assessed by a Left-Brained system.  Could it be that the instruments that might measure what Black people were good at had simply never been created?  That we were being mistakenly measured by tests that would never provide any real information about who and what we were, and what gifts we brought with us into the world?  And that we would always have our intelligence and talents under-estimated by those left-brained analytical social scientists whose work would continue to over-estimate their gifts and talents simply by default?

Have you ever had the chance to watch little black girls jumping rope; Double Dutch?  The physical/mental skills needed by that childhood game  would challenge any lesser human beings who tried to blend the complex elements required for success.  Elements of rhythms, songs, intricate footwork, agility, the coordination needed is so daunting that one stands in awe.  What is demanded by this simple children's game puts shame to anyone whose psyche didn't include the "jazz" element, the gift born to most ordinary black children, and genetically passed along through the generations.

We see those same gifts illustrated on the basketball courts of the NBA, in Track and Field activities, on the stage in chorus lines, all serving as raw materials to the (European) coaches, choreographers, artists and athletes, who expropriate what they can use and toss the rest and black folks with them!

The analytical Left-Brainers break apart the elements, analyze, re-assemble the steps (strokes, notes, etc.) into an often reasonable facsimile of the original, and "own it."  And as often as not, set up the inevitable competition to establish dominance.  They re-define the "it," and critique it into something that those who created it have seldom reduced to mere words, but who can look into the eyes of another "sistah" or "brotha" with an instantaneous mumble of understanding and connection.  They may give it substance by assigning the over-used word, "Soul," or "Amen!" and are content to let it go at that.

I've always cringed at the sight and sound of superb black "back-up" singers and dancers fronted by less than spectacular "Stars" who gloried in the stolen spotlight.  A well known folk singer "fronting" that magnificent South African choir, Ladysmith Mambazo, comes to mind.


And what does all this have to do with me?

Everything.

When I think back to the mystery of my late-blooming attention-getting fame in these final years, and wonder just why it happened, I've come to many explanations over time.  Could be because my life as recorded in these pages provide for the searching aging Boomer generation a reasonable alternative to the adulation of youth culture so common in this country.  Could be.  Could also be that the candor with which I deal with all that is a novelty.  Could be.

Lately a new rationale has risen to the surface, one that feels more likely;

The magic may be that -- for reasons unknown -- I've remained contemporary for my entire life.  Always a creature of the hour, living in the "Now!" This has been my true state of being since childhood. That's still where I'm positioned on the Spectrum of Life, and that may be best reflected in my work.

Instead of nostalgically looking back at the world of 1942-1945 -- the period celebrated by the Rosie the Riveter National Park site -- I'm interpreting that period against the canvas of "Now!", relating it to the environmental changes occurring in these critical years; seeing them in the context of generational challenges that share at least one thing -- the urgency that will wait for no one.

How my generation met the challenge of those hazardous years is a dramatic and gut-wrenching dilemma that today's youth are again being forced to confront.  It's another "Do or Die" era, and there are models for facing what lies ahead as the Earth continues into climactic change.  The threat is equal to and may surpass the terrifying times my generation has already lived through.  We have a duty to provide those models for the survival of the species, and I'm still around to participate in doing just that along with those of my time who are still alive.

Having lived into the future that I, along with millions of others, helped to create 50 years ago, I'm doing it in truth, and with the support and blessings of a federal agency.  I'm able to do it because of the "Jazz" element that may be our people's gifts to the world. Because we're willing and able to drop the guise of feigned innocence ("I've never owned any slaves; get over it!").  To challenge the concept of White Supremacy and the insatiable hunger to maintain Empire over the entire known world; as humanity assumes the responsibility of entering into this period of the Grand Improvisation that will be essential if we're to survive into the unknown future.

It does no good to look to the past for answers, at least not until we've heeded and absorbed the warnings from the scientific community.  Those answers lie in questions still to be developed by as yet unknowing professionals of all of the disciplines; they, who must rise to the crucial, troubling, and urgent needs now forecast by the futurists of the scientific world.

The entire world may now be entering the world of

                                  "Jazz!"

because the worlds of the fundamentalist past have profoundly and utterly failed us.