In July, shortly after posting my third blog, “Females, Males, and the Balance of Power Between Them,” I felt a pleasant internal churning, like there was a developing group of materials that would be emerging as another essay.
Following an inner sensing, the first thing I was drawn to was a book Jim had read and recommended a few months ago about the history of black golf players here in the United States, Uneven Lies, The Heroic Story of African-Americans in Golf, by Pete McDaniel with the Foreword written by Tiger Woods. (Jim says that in golf language “lie” is a term meaning the way the ball lies as the game is played.) Both McDaniel, who is an African-American and Tiger Woods—who is racially a blend of African-American from his father, Earl, and Thai from his mother, Kultida (“Tida”)—told some very personal stories about their growing-up years and difficult racial experiences here in the United States.
I was touched and teary as I read McDaniel‘s and Woods‘ stories, including the one when Tiger played in the Masters at Augusta National as U.S. Amateur champion in 1995; he wrote that the first time he drove down Magnolia Lane he was thinking about all the great African-American players who never got a chance to play there. Woods goes on to say that when he was able to win the Masters at Augusta in 1997, he believes he brought a little bit of vindication for them. He talked about the life lessons his parents taught him: respect and appreciation for people of diverse backgrounds and colors, and knowing about those who came before him. His father had made sure Tiger was vividly aware of the earlier struggles of black golfers and baseball players. (Earl was a former college baseball player who saw a connection between the celebration of Jackie Robinson‘s defining moment 50 years ago—his breakthrough in major league baseball—and Tiger‘s that Sunday at Augusta.)
I could clearly see some direct connections with my previous gender essay—where I talked about leveling the playing field and the balance of power between Jim and me; and connections with the underlying ”troublemakers,” as I termed patterns of oppositional dualism, ranking of superiority/inferiority, either/or thinking, the use of fear, and a belief there is only One Truth. From my point of view, the troublemakers run rampant in race relations, too. In addition to the United States being primarily a nation of immigrants, it is also a nation with a history of black slavery—people who were brought to these shores involuntarily from Africa. And, it's a nation where people already lived on the land before the immigrants and black slaves arrived, people we now describe as Native Americans.
So race and racial relationships would obviously be one of the themes in this new essay.
Later that week—July 16th-19th—the 2009 British Open golf championship was being played at Turnberry, Scotland. It had been part of my attraction to the book, Uneven Lies, because Jim would be watching some of it for four days. Tiger Woods was a prominent participant early-on. He had won three previous British Opens, but this year he didn‘t make the cut on Friday, thereby being out of the tournament. Jim‘s interest in golf throughout his Life has continued up to the present. His direct involvement with it now is from the viewpoint of developing and increasing his skills, and playing in a few tournaments without using designs he culturally used in earlier decades for competition. It‘s also a type of exercise he enjoys; and he enjoys watching great players.
Furthermore, it was the week I would get the book, The Thing Around Your Neck, by the female Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
All together, I felt a lot of multidimensional simultaneousness and interrelatedness, where invisible connections flowed between me as a composite being and other spirit-being people, too.
And, I was being drawn to buy a twelve hour, twenty-four part audio CD presentation, “American Religious History,” one of The Teaching Company‘s Great Courses. It traced various religions from European backgrounds and those of native peoples at the founding of the United States, including African-American religion, up to the present. (In the past, Jim and I had seen some of The Teaching Company‘s video courses about music and French Impressionism, which we both had experienced as informative and well-done.) Here too—in my opinion, along with gender and race, the troublemakers play out extensively with people of one religion relating with people of other religions.
So I had the emphases for my next essay—race, religions, and more about gender—while seeing the troublemakers as underlying energies amidst them all.
When I was clear about the framework and major contents for this essay I spread it all out, to appropriately interweave with the multiple strands of my Life, Jim's, and our dyadic focuses. The lilies were blooming—orange day lilies around the pond and yellow ones in the front yard, with intense gold flowers that were a longer-lasting variety in banks in the bulb bed. Around the front deck were white, light pink, and miniature rose-colored hollyhocks. Then at the side of the garage, from the large trumpet vine on a wooden trellis there, orange flowers shaped like (what else?) trumpets were emerging. From the backyard, Jim was picking raspberries to add to our morning fresh fruit mixture, while eating them outside immediately—just picked and warmed by the sun—was a big-time Event. I was on Easy Street … and it was delightful.
Reading Adichie‘s book, The Thing Around Your Neck, added more to my Understandings of some fairly recent African immigrant experiences here in the United States, and increased my clarity about designs, past and present, that I believe are part of the composite psychic swimming pool of patterns for males, globally, and the contents of the composite psychic materials for the overall female psyche, globally. I also reread the section in Barack Obama's book, Dreams from My Father, when he described his trip to Kenya to visit relatives in his father's homeland, before entering law school. I saw that the tribal customs for gender roles in Kenya formed the fertile background prior to colonialism, and then the gender designs from European countries were superimposed upon and interwoven with the already-existing tribal patterns for gender.
As an example of Kenyan male gender patterns, in his memoir, before his Kenya trip Barack wrote about a meeting with his half-brother, Roy, (whose mother was a black Kenyan). The two of them had dinner one night in Washington, D.C., where Roy was living at the time. During dinner Roy had talked about his worldview: He was the oldest son, and in their tribal (Luo) tradition he was the head of the family now. Therefore, as head of the family, Roy believed he was responsible for Barack, Roy's sister, and all the younger boys. According to Roy, it was his responsibility to pay the boys‘ school fees, to see that his sister was properly married, and to build a proper house and bring the family together.
In the afternoon before watching President Obama‘s prime time news conference that evening—Wednesday, 7/22/09—I finished reading the Kenya section from his book, Dreams from My Father. During his press conference that evening, which was primarily focused on health care legislation, President Obama commented on a recent situation that had taken place between the black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and a white Cambridge, MA police officer, Sgt. James Crowley. Obama‘s comments that evening opened up even further many racial tensions, perspectives, and opinions across the Internet, the blogosphere, in newspapers, and elsewhere. Frankly, I saw it as healthy when both men—Gates and Crowley—talked about their realities, which from my point of view were each from within different matrixes. (The word “matrix” as I am using it is the belief structure a person is enclosed within from which he or she sees, reacts, and relates with others—who are also within their own matrixes.)
On Thursday, July 30th, Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley met with President Obama and Vice President Biden in the White House Rose Garden. Over beers they talked about ways to move ahead and to make the racially charged controversy “a teachable moment,” to build greater understandings. Crowley and Gates plan to meet again soon for a further discussion.
I am seeing President Obama playing a part where he is the leader of a country where we are all Americans of many colors and races, who potentially are in a process of learning how to relate to and respect one another, building upon and expanding what those in the 1960s had begun …who were building upon what those who came before them had begun … which continues to be an ever-evolving process.
Even though I was spreading it all out, it became obvious I needed to rethink how much to put in the essay. Also, there were a lot of global, national, and regional developments to keep up with, including the ongoing racial perspectives and conversations which had been opened up from the Gates-Crowley incident, whose fires were added to by President Obama‘s press conference comments. And many other strands of Jim and my Lives were beckoning. Therefore, I decided to delve into The Teaching Company‘s audio series about religions in America at a later time. For years I had been accumulating materials around the theme of what made the land of my birth unique, and so sometime in the future I would listen to the American religion tapes and go through the rest of those materials.
With a feeling of relief I returned to read the rest of Pete McDaniel‘s book, Uneven Lies, The Heroic Story of African-Americans in Golf, recheck resource materials, do some additional research, and complete this essay. I thought McDaniel did a superb job tracing black players‘ struggles and successes throughout U.S. golf history. He wrote that when Joe Louis, the ex Heavyweight Champion of the World, went to San Diego in 1952 to play in the San Diego Open, Louis said they would have to tell him to his face he couldn‘t play. (There was a Caucasian-only clause on the PGA at the time, but Louis did play.) McDaniel stated that blacks were not looking for a handout, no special rules, they just wanted an even playing field. (Hence the other meaning for the Uneven Lies' book title.)
Summarizing the three major themes for now of “troublemaker” results:
*Race and racial relationships. My internal picture is one where each of us stands back from creating and being enclosed within the matrix of beliefs we personally use, clearly seeing them and their results in the past and present, with Compassion and Understanding for us all.
*People of one religion relating with people of other religions. A few weeks ago I read some writings by a renowned religious scholar who passed on in 1986. As I interpreted what I read, his central emphases was a belief in “the sacred” as the source of power, significance and value, where each religion approaches that dimension in their own way. I think that‘s a wise perspective to use about one‘s own religion and spiritual beliefs, and how to think about the religions and spiritual beliefs of other people.
*Gender. Ah yes, gender. Certainly I think race and religious/spiritual patterns are very important, and, I also think gender is an especially volatile area each one of us as humans, in all cultures, is directly enmeshed within daily. What patterns do I choose to energize? Which me do I choose to experience? Which matrix do I choose to live amidst?
Conclusion. Beginning in the early 1970s, Jim and I started our emphases of Something Different. Over the years it expanded to Something Very Different, and now after almost four decades it has evolved to Something Completely Different.
As I listen to other people, I am hearing a repeating theme of disappointment in President Obama and his Administration—where from many quarters he is not living up to what people had hoped he would be doing when he got elected—that he hasn't been going far enough (or is going too far). And my response is that I am no stranger to my own attempts to change myself and my Life experiences. In his case, he is trying to change a whole society, the United States of America, and its relationships with the rest of the world. I see it all as a huge job, and greatly admire much of what he's attempting to do, which I think is to succeed in stabilizing the economy, making the whole system fairer-for-all, and the U.S. more competitive globally.
To those who are upset that he isn't going far enough, I seriously question what else he can do within the current-day enclosed matrixes of cultural beliefs, nationally and globally. The only way I know to go far enough is to take the whole system apart and design from scratch, from the position of liberated and skillful spirit-beingness, both as individuals and as groups.
With Highest-Good-for-All Best Wishes, J.
