Turtle Mindfulness Part II. . . by Turtle GG

Poet Mary Oliver suggests: 

“Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do….

Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in…. “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”*

        Arriving back in Kansas I savored memories on the beach with my family.  I like to practice being mindful of the moments each day and began to think about how to be sure to teach the grandkids about being in the moment. I consider mindfulness a sure-fire and portable way to relieve stress and put more joy in our daily lives. Then, silly me, again, I realized that children are probably the most mindful beings I know. Their natural curiosity and spontaneity put them in the present as though each moment is important.

”Oh Lord, how shining and festive is your gift to us, if we

                       only look, and see.”**

         I had watched as little noses were down close in the sand checking out the turrets in the sand castles and the residents of the tidal pools, checking the surf for sea shells.  

        And Mrs. Loggerhead Turtle had a lesson for me. There was nothing on her mind but the sand and surf on a full moon night, needing to lay her eggs. Really nothing short of danger would deter her mindfulness. While kids were exploring, there I had been off thinking of prehistoric turtles making the same trip for thousands of years and currents from East Africa to SC. How far out from the moment was I? Fortunately, nature and children can teach us many things. Surely these memories have longevity to encourage devotion to caring for nature.

        Attention is also related to mindfulness. Paying close attention to our relationships, especially as children share curiosity and joy, encourages life-long connection. The kids were tuned in to the starfish with only four arms but clearly growing back a fifth, and the best part was sharing it with their cousins and aunts and uncles, grandparents. They could hardly run fast enough to show each treasure they found--the helmet crab, ghost crab, the intact sand dollar. This idea of including your loved ones in what delights you is the best kind of attention to the world. Adults have joyful moments to share, too. Mary Oliver invites us all let our lights shine--

                   “It’s simple,” they say,

                   and you too have come

                   into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled

with light, and to shine.”***

         

*Mary Oliver, Upstream (2006) p 8.

**Mary Oliver, “Look and See,” Why I Wake Early (2004) p 26.

***Mary Oliver, “When I Am Among the Trees,” Thirst (2006) p 4.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    --Elder  Turtle GG

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Growing Up in Kansas, "EATING CROW," by Aldwyn

Growing Up in Kansas

Eating Crow

           Leroy and I were driving around Pawnee Lake yesterday afternoon when I saw a dead crow in the ditch.  I said that I was pretty sure my Father told me that there used to be "a five-cent-a-head bounty back in the good old days!” Then, for some strange reason, I asked him if he had ever eaten crow. 

       Leroy replied that he never had the pleasure, but the rest of the family had, except Grandpa.  I immediately asked for the rest of the story. 

           It seems that his Grandpa cleaned a crow one time and told Grandma that the crow was a prairie chicken. He said, “That cleaned meat was almost as black as the crow.” Grandma then cooked the offering. “Of course, she thought it was a prairie chicken,”  Leroy said. "So at dinner, Grandpa, he just passed on the crow and sent it around the table." 

     

        Grandma pretty much summed up the family's attitude about the so-called prairie chicken.  “That hen must have been pretty old as it didn’t taste very good and was pretty darn tough.”  

        Leroy asked how his Grandfather kept from laughing at the dinner table. He told me, “He did not dare to and did not think Grandma ever knew that crow had been eaten by the rest of the family.” 

       Leroy and I laughed all the way back from the lake.

*As told to me.  The names have been changed to protect the innocent…  By Aldwin

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"Coexist -- It's in our DNA" by Grandmother Windsong

            The cornerstone of my Judeo-Christian upbringing proclaims the inscription “Love Thy Neighbor.”  I learned as a child that my “neighbor” might be living across town, on the East Coast, in the Soviet Union, in a tent in the Middle East, in a jungle in Africa, or in an adobe “casa” in Mexico.  My church was big on missionaries.   

        We sang out loud and strong in Sunday School that  “Jesus loves . . .  all the children of the world.”  I believed it and tried to live it;  however, I must admit that I received a bit of satisfaction when the teacher caught the mean girl in second grade cheating and she had to stay at her desk during recess.  

            In 1964, my nine-year-old heart nearly broke in two when I discovered a lot of people rejected that cornerstone and forgot or ignored the words to my Sunday school song.  I watched news reports of African-American teens smashed against buildings by powerful sprays from fire hoses and beaten with sticks. Blood trickled down their foreheads. Vicious dogs lunged at them.  Months later, a dynamite blast killed four Black girls in the safest place in the world--a church basement.  A month later Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated my president, John F. Kennedy. We were told the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons and they were pointing them at us!  

        Heavy stuff for a little kid.

        I couldn’t understand why we didn't get along.  In my child-like mind, it seemed rather easy to love our neighbors.  Why didn’t grownups feel this connection to coexist peacefully--to love one another? 

         Now that I'm a grandmother with an insatiable curiosity and a delicious amount of time, I read a little science and dabble in genealogy.  I took a DNA test, which helped me discover that the desire to coexist with others is embedded deep within us, so deep that it is in our DNA. 

            Like most people, especially Americans, I have a mixed heritage. My British, Irish, and German DNA coexist with a small percentage of DNA found among people in the Middle East and India. Recently, I learned that my ancestral Gaelic tongue shares common words with Sanskrit in India, indicating people migrated a long way over time. 

 My Eastern Europe, possibly Polish, genes coincide with the discovery that my ancestral patronymic name is Jewish and that my Polish/Jewish forebears probably converted to Protestantism over two hundred years ago--either at the point of a sword or because they bonded with people hauling around the cornerstone of love.  I don't think my grandparents, with a Jewish surname, would have survived if they had lived in Poland when the Nazis during World War II.   

       

The point is this:  different "people" of my body's genetic soup get along fine.  

 

        The science video Your Inner Fish gave me more to think about. When I was an embryo in my mother's womb, waiting to evolve into my final human shape, I looked exactly like billions of other human embryos.  Even more amazing our human embryos have a basic vertebrate body similar to fish, dogs, birds, and all creatures with spines.  To the unscientific eye, the photos of a fish embryo appear nearly identical to a human embryo.  As our fish-like embryo morphs into human form, our gill arches become ear bones and we lose our tails.   

        And so with all of this internal and primordial coexisting with all the world's children  and millions of other creatures, I’m again asking the question I asked as a fourth grader: “Why can’t we get along with our neighbors?”

                                                           --- Grandmother Windsong

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"Restoring America’s Image" by Myster E

I grew up in the fifties in Athens, Greece. I remember, while in grade school, we were given a slice of orange cheese every day from a box that said: “USA-Aid." It was part of the Marshall Plan for post-WWII Greece.

My mother grew up in a small village on an island in the Ionian Sea. The conditions there and then were worse than poor. My grandfather had less than an acre of land to support a family of 13. Although my mother and all her siblings ended up in Athens, becoming successful entrepreneurs, this could not have happened without my grandmother’s brother. He had emigrated to the US as a young man and was able to send a stipend to his sister every month.

I lived in Smith Center, Kansas for about 30 years. I remember visiting the Smith County Memorial Hospital time and time again and reading the names of several Smith County boys who were killed during WW II in a field in Europe or on an island in the Pacific.

These three short stories have something in common. They reflect the role the US has played in the world for at least the last hundred years. America has been the refuge for millions of poor and persecuted from every corner of the earth. America has shared its wealth with needy people around the world. America has been the beacon of freedom and democracy. Last but not least, American military power has been a safeguard for stability and peace around the globe.

I visited Greece and Cyprus this past summer (2017) and listened to several European networks. One thing that impressed me sadly was that the image of America has been tarnished. People who were looking for an excuse to attack our country, now they found it. Most Europeans do not see the US as they used to. They see a country that is becoming more self-centered and isolationist. They see the undisputed superpower renege its commitments for world stability and peace. They see the richest country on earth deciding to ignore some of its obligations to care for the environment.

I wonder how much of this is true. Has one man’s slogans changed the American egalitarian spirit? I do not believe so.  I do believe that most people in this country still maintain their high values. We are still the country that is the envy of the world. Our economy is still the best among major industrial countries. Our universities are still a dream for most young people everywhere. We are still the leaders in science, technology, and culture.

Because we are a big part of the earth’s community, what we stand for should be good for the world. America’s image must be restored. This is a responsibility for each one of us as Americans. The whole world is still watching us.

                                                                                --- Elder Myster E  

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