Contributing Our Gifts

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

–Rilke, from “Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower”

While Nebraska and Wyoming are often areas people in the US dismiss as boring, I think my new book coming out later this year, Stories We Didn’t Tell (to be published by Shanti Arts) will change your mind about that. A tale with prairie landscape, blue skies, tremendous storms, and endless wind tides, there’s more to Nebraska and Wyoming than first meets the eye. The horizontal lines of the grasslands landscape are but the surface. Stories We Didn’t Tell will take you into the depths of life’s hardships yet instill you with heart and spirit that offers a vision for ways to live inside the challenges of our own era. As my 10^th grade world history teacher Mr. Pegas, quoting Voltaire used to say, “Common sense isn’t so common.” Neither are the lives of ordinary people.

The book’s main character, Adah, a feisty female, is born into a family of homesteaders in Nebraska during a century of immense change. As in our own times, the characters in Stories We Didn’t Tell inhabit an era of environmental and social uncertainty. Adah and her family live through repeated droughts, economic depression, a pandemic, two World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam war, the development of mechanized farming and agribusiness, the rise of mega churches, and the arrival of birth control and arguments over women’s rights–concerns that continue to resonate today.

Currently in the US, government officials have approved the sale of thousands of acres of public land to private entities that “could destroy some of America’s most treasured places and imperiled wildlife habitat,” says Randi Spivak, public lands policy director at the Center for Biodiversity. US federal agents are pulling citizens off the streets without being told the charges against them. The US government has laid off hundreds of staff members at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, including employees of the National Weather Service, responsible for weather forecasts and alerts across the country. Donald Trump signed an executive order to abolish the US Department of Education, meaning “less resources for our most vulnerable students, larger class sizes, fewer special education services for students with disabilities, and less civil rights protections,” says National Education Association President Becky Pringle. Each of these things affects future lives in dramatic and disturbing ways. 

Things we thought were solid are falling apart.

It’s true that everything changes and we’re meant to change too. The question is what do we want to change into and who do we want to become? Our lives are interconnected with each other. All beings want to be treated with care and kindness, including animals and the whole of the natural world. The thoughts we nurture and choices we make create effects that ripple through our lives, our communities, and across the world.

It takes time to learn how to leave behind the world we came from, and to create the world we want to live in, as this short piece shows from Stories We Didn’t Tell where early on in her marriage Adah describes the world she wants to live inside.

Speaking of Desire
Adah, 1911
Des Moines, Iowa

We’ve moved to Des Moines. 
Gerard is learning carpentry and making cabinets. 
His father wanted his help at his shop.

Like my father, Gerard’s father is a religious
man with demanding expectations. 
Unlike my father, he is kind.

As before marriage when living at Lenore
and Jed’s house, I wash clothes, cook,
keep house. There’s a lot I don’t 
understand about relationships and living 
with a man, but I do know I want to be more 
than simply useful to Gerard, more than 
a helpful assistant, chosen because I happen
to be there, the way a paintbrush 
might be selected for a needed task.

I want to be valuable.
Not for what I can do, 
or who I remind him of:
his sister who shares my same name,
his first wife who died in childbirth, 
a woman he joins in bed, 
or some role I fill,
but for myself.

Gerard works at the shop all day. 
Evenings he labors at the desk 
over the business’s books he keeps 
for his father. We both work long hours. 

Setting work aside to wander down a road
hoping to discover something unexpected— 
that is what I long for. A spring afternoon
beside the river, our voices mingled with 
water and a cedar waxwing’s whistle, 
or us walking under a cottonwood’s flame
that burns into a cloudless sky—these 
are what I wish for—life full with possibility, 
open like the plains. 

I want Gerard to reach for my hand, 
gather me to him in a smile that says 
I matter more than the role
given me, more than all the rules 
about clean houses in paradise, 
ledgers between us balanced.

(Originally published on Beate Sigriddaughter’s site, Writing a Woman’s Voice)

How we speak about and treat others is vitally important in creating the world we will end up living in. As Charles Eisenstein writes in  The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, “We are all here to contribute our gifts toward something greater than ourselves, and will never be content unless we are.” Let our words and actions be gifts of life.