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A Myth for Dark Times

2/24/2017

FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, Don Raiche
Don lives and works at Apple Farm.

  Last autumn Barack Obama spoke of what is needed at this time, “The only way anything gets done is to recognize the truth of the person opposite you; get in their heads and see through their eyes.” Now autocratic governance, exemplified by arbitrary exercise of power, and assertions that those in power may act without regard for truth, or the well-being of all life and the planet itself, challenges our ways of response. Obama has put his finger on a basic and ancient truth.
We all know stories where virtues of empathy or compassion triumph against ruthless power.  I have long thought that J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is a myth for our times. Most of us are familiar enough with this myth to permit me to pick up within the story.  The hero Frodo is not trying to achieve a great prize. No, the task is to destroy something that appears to confer power on its possessor; to rid middle earth of the Ring of Power through which its possessor can dominate and control all others.
The Ring of Power must never be put on, even to try to destroy the power of domination.   Those with legitimate authority can act from that authority but not with the Ring of Power.  Aragon, the rightful king, can fight for the restoration of Gondor; Gandalf can fight against the evils of corrupted wizards; Frodo has inherited the Ring from his uncle Bilbo.  Nevertheless the Ring of Power itself can’t conquer the evil of Sauron.

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The Struggle of Memory Against Forgetting

2/18/2017

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FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, Jo Marie Thompson
Jo lives, works and writes from her home in Wisconsin.

“The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” - Milan Kundera

Who?

Who knows
the names of things
and can recover them entire
from the obscuration, and
forever dwelling fog
of forgetting?

From the couldn’t quite hear,
couldn’t quite bear to see;
the nearly murdered,
and still suffering;
the tremors
and tribulations;
the urgings into being
and the stampings out
(the way it’s always come about)?

Even now – notice:
The penumbra of an eclipsed sun;
the remains of a fallen moment;
the four extinctions that occurred today
of species not yet named.

Well (and of course),
who cares to consort
with those who
name grief
anyway?

Driving through the deserts of New Mexico recently I was moved to pick up a book titled “Witchcraft in the Southwest” by Marc Simmons. In my ignorance I expected to find a story of Christianity’s conflict with “pagan” religion, and descriptions of Native people’s wisdom traditions persecuted as “witchcraft” by European colonizers. Instead I found a portrait of the windy path of human identification with one or the other dualistic extreme of “good” or “evil” and the subsequent compensation of the collective psyche, seeking balance and wholeness. The tracery of either pole is impossible to track as it inverts itself over and over, and winds in turn over the terrain of cultures variously blending through migration, colonization & war. The story proved to be anything but straight forward, at least through the lens of this particular piece of anthropological research. Most aspects of the history ring familiar in the echoes emanating now from contemporary political landscapes - if not in fact, definitely in motif: Scapegoating and projection, fear, subversion, persecution, retribution. The familiar dichotomies spring to life: fundamentalism vs wisdom; superstition & demands to conform to collective understanding vs discernment and growth. Other subtler themes arise: When does resistance, subversion and wisdom itself begin to revert to unseeing collectivism? What exactly is “evil?” What is supernatural? What is the role of sorcery and its apprentices? When does their work degenerate into its own clinging to power, greed and violence? At what point in these processes does the call to awaken, to become more conscious, to grow & discern, become THE fundamental call. How do we do the work of transforming injustice and inhumanity while protecting that call and resisting the fall into the obscuration of forgetting?

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What might we have to say from Apple Farm in these times?

2/12/2017

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FROM APPLE FARM WRITER, Sara Sage
Sara lives and works in the Elkhart/South Bend, IN area. She writes in response to the fairy tale The Elves and the Shoemaker

This cycle of campaigning, the election, and the inauguration has been a challenge for many, regardless of political leanings. The cynicism, attacks, and untruths in the election process, and autocratic manner in which many perceive the first days of the Trump administration to represent, have been very depressing for many and outright frightening for others. Many Americans felt the same fear when President Obama was elected. It is clear that a variety of groups of people are feeling dispossessed and ignored. In the midst of an energy that makes many I’ve talked with recently personally and professionally want to simply “tune out” on social media and news, what are we to do that makes a difference?

There are many answers to that question, but one I’d like to focus on involves, as always, our personal responsibility to ourselves and our inner work. We might also look at how the United States can look collectively at our maturity as a nation, and at a tendency to avoid the need to do the hard, adult work of democracy in disagreeing and talking and working it through (perhaps a need to find the transcendent function as a nation?). In order to frame this, I’d like to use the classic fairy tale The Elves and the Shoemaker. Assuming most of you know the story, I’ll just refer to a few of the details.

In this story, which Jungian analyst Allan Chinen refers to as a “midlife” story in his book Once Upon a Midlife (2003), the shoemaker and his wife have worked hard for a number of years but fallen on hard times. In come the elves, in the middle of the night, sliding in on a moonbeam, to bring the magic back to the couple by stitching up shoes for them, which sell for a good deal of money, allowing the couple to purchase more leather and so on. When the couple decides to watch one night and sees the naked, playful elves, they make clothing and boots for them, which delights the elves but also causes them never to come back. However, our couple continues their work and is successful through the rest of their lives.

As Chinen points out, one of the things that makes this story different from many fairy tales that include “lost” magical elements is that this couple is not being “punished” for being greedy or inappropriate – they are doing all the right things. When the magic of the elves leaves, they simply keep working and now incorporate this magic into their own skill and discipline, modeling the inevitable developmental task of “growing up” into the reality of work and persistence required for a successful life. Knowledge and consciousness in this story – like in the Genesis story of Adam and Eve leaving the garden – lead to more shoemaking and ongoing hard work. Also in this story, the shoes seem to represent a kind of groundedness – the shoes are not magical like in more youth-oriented fairy tales (e.g. Dorothy’s ruby slippers) – but seem to represent the solid responsibility of putting one foot in front of the other that we may learn in midlife and later years.

Of course, the elves could also represent dreams that come in the middle of the night, and help us determine creative solutions at any point in our lives. Maybe the shoemaker and his wife, having done the grind of responsibility for a number of years, needed to recall how to introduce the “magic” of the creativity found in the unconscious and to take the care to see the elves and pay attention to what they were doing. (Personally, my least favorite part of the story is clothing the elves – maybe sometimes we need to have fun and cavort in the unselfconscious nakedness of children’s play, even as mature adults, but we also have to acknowledge social conventions and be present in the real world!)

So our story may help us with our dilemma of what to do in these troubled times. It reminds us not only of our mature adult responsibility to keep working, to keep doing what we know is right and helps us be responsible citizens, and not expect “magic” to take care of things for us. It also reminds us to not neglect our creative life – to pay attention to our dreams and to use our active imagination – in the midst of our responsibility, and that perhaps some elven magic (even naked playfulness!) helps us balance some of the heaviness of responsibility and also come up with creative ways we can be active citizens, or resolve a conflict, or find ways to transcend our differences with friends, family, partners, and coworkers.

Chinen asks a series of provocative questions for discussion at the end of his chapter about The Elves and the Shoemaker. I’d like to end by quoting several of them below, from the community and national level of consciousness, for your own musing (Chinen, 2003, pp. 42-43):

In your workplace or community, who are the helpful elves? . . . Who in your community wants to find out about these helpers? Who wants to just leave well enough alone?
What gifts would these elves need to move on to better things?
Would your group be willing to give those gifts and go back to doing more work? Why would your community want to help the elves – noble virtue, liberal’s guilt, fundamentalist morality?
If the shoemaker were America, who are the elves who produce wonderful things for the country? . . . What would be involved in clothing these elves so they can move on?

Today, America relies on high-tech elves to solve problems, from pollution to AIDS and the war on terrorism. What would it mean for us to let those elves go on and do more work ourselves, not relying on their magic?

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Apple Farm Winter Blog 2017

2/12/2017

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Last winter, a dozen or so people responded to an invitation to offer some thoughts in response to the question; what do we have to say from Apple Farm in the face of fear? That question emerged from the world-wide impact of the shootings in Paris. This years theme/question; what might we have to say from Apple Farm in these times?
Thanks to Amy Carpenter Leugs who offers the poem below which begins the winter blog.

Pro-test (n)
          in favor of testifying
my right hand
on the holy book
of my markered sign

colors
brown
like the eyes of children I teach

green
leaves on trees climbed
by Anishinaabe for centuries

words
spoken in sweat session
with the elder Odawa
all my ancestors

vision
tall thin ancients
dark as a spider’s web
walking from the African continent
into this moment

- Amy Carpenter Leugs

Note: I am developing a new series of poems that explores a language (tongue) of resistance (to stand again).   Joan Miller helped me by pointing out the root of the word “protest” (in favor of testifying, or testimony).  I decided that when I protest in this xenophobic time, I am testifying to our shared roots, to our African and indigenous ancestors.
I am learning that poets of resistance need to develop a lexicon that is grounded and transforming, because the populist leader over-inflates and over-simplifies their rhetoric.

Poets reclaimed the German language after Hitler by creating poems that were lists … of pancake ingredients, of things they took to the concentration camps.  Concrete language helps us find common ground and build again from the bottom up.  Exploring etymology helps us reclaim the history of our words and to rethink their meanings.  Maybe this is the necessary foundation to exploring symbols and stories as white supremacy comes out of hiding again.

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...it is in part by our response to the great stories of the world that we too can begin to find, each of us this individual story expressing the symbolic meaning behind the facts of our fate and behind the motives that determine the day-to-day choices of our lives. -Helen Luke, The Inner Story

A Myth for Dark Times

The Struggle of Memory Against Forgetting

What might we have to say from Apple Farm in these times?

﻿Apple Farm Winter Blog 2017

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Apple Farm Winter Blog 2017