Watching, listening and reading the news this past week has been like attending a mental gymkhana. What with executive orders coming out of the White House like arrows at Little Big Horn, keeping up with the news has meant using all the media at hand, not just one or two favorites.
It’s meant adding the commentators
to the mix, too, reading the opinion
writers as well as more traditional journalists whose reports are required to
be as objective as humanly possible (which turns out to be more humanly
difficult than we once thought.) The
editorial cartoons and comic strips have contributed focus for me, while the
wordsmiths and photographers have added depth and breadth. Valley Public Radio has provided grains of
truth to chew through the day, while MSN’s Breaking News banners have alerted
me to new twists and turns, frequently diverting me from my day’s purpose.
But Sunday’s Bee caused a temporary
meltdown, primarily the page where Mas Masumoto topped Victor Davis
Hanson. Both Valley boys born on Fresno
County’s fertile farm soil, one with orchards, the other with vines, their
words mean a lot to me even when I don’t agree. Sometimes Mas is too bucolic
for me, while reading VDH is always like wrestling a prickly pear: a lot of thorns have to be removed afterward.
Unfortunately, their two
contributions Sunday, at opposite ends of the playing field, seemed both right
and simultaneously futile. I left the
scene of the crime – the paper-strewn breakfast table – and went to the sink to
clean up my mind as well as the dishes. There,
with my hands in the warm water, I remembered my friend Andrea in Merced, who
is an artist. My distressed mind began
to relax.
Andrea paints still lifes and
landscapes, and also writes poetry, but her primary form of artistic
contribution is something she calls “mixed media.” In form, it is a combination of drawing,
cutting and pasting, then copying the whole shebang and coloring portions to
shade and shape the message. That’s the
form, the style. But the content, the
message she’s bringing home relentlessly and without fail, is how she weaves
together the complex, and often conflicting, fragments of her life, how her
heart makes sense of the world.
It’s a constant struggle, making
sense of her world and ours. Since
having her own personal meltdown in late 1999, when her brain inflamed and a
virus stole most of what her verbal center had learned over 50-some years,
she’s questioned both God’s lovingkindness and her own ability to tolerate
living repeatedly. Yet her struggle
benefits her, makes her stronger every time she wrestles that angel to the
ground. Perhaps as a reward for
struggling, she gets more glimpses of beauty than many of us, and then she puts
those glimpses on paper for us to see. In
a way, she’s teaching us survival skills.
Art also teaches us how to proceed
even in the dark, when the mind can’t make sense of the world around it. Still restless after my stint at the sink
Sunday, I turned to my book of Quaker writings, which opened to a poem written
by a girl before her adulthood arrived.
Under the title “Madras Airport,” Mira McCelland wrote in 1998:
My
heart is beating fast.
Landing,
there
is the smell of heat;beggars
enclose me.
They
don’t say a word, but
their
eyes are screaming,
“Help
me, help me!”
I
am ten years old;
I
want to help them but
I
can’t.
I
don’t say a word,
but
with my eyes I say,
“I’m
coming,
I’m
coming.”
Mira’s
ten-year-old bravery helps me every time I read her words.
Art is another form of truthtelling,
and a process of working out new understandings, new solutions. These weeks ahead do not promise to sort
themselves out, much less the months and years.
Sorting is our job, and maybe in this current upheaval, we have a new
opportunity to participate. Onward,
friends. Tell them we’re coming.
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Trudy
Wischemann is in the final editing stages of her book on agriculture and the
common good. You can send her your
mixed-up responses to this new regime c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247, but
don’t expect a response anytime soon.
You can also leave a
comment below.
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