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In the Company of Rebels. Chellis Glendinning
Читать онлайн.Название In the Company of Rebels
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isbn 9781613320976
Автор произведения Chellis Glendinning
Издательство Ingram
Plus, the kicker: “I’m grateful to have a copy of that cute photo of us taken at that party in Berkeley. The particular ‘party-dress’ you’re wearing makes you look the demure, ingenuous girl-next-door who has just returned from her junior-year-abroad with a rather good term paper all about environmental politics in Germany.”
Nearing retirement in the late 1980s, Ponderosa moved to Chiang Mai, Thailand, where the tropical climate suited him better than that of Bolinas’ Pacific coastline and dollars from his Social Security pension went farther towards survival than they would have inside the U.S. I hear tell that his journey to Asia and subsequent return visits heralded the first time since 1968 that he had actually donned a pair of shoes. As the twenty-first century unfolded—particularly after the 2001 Twin Towers attacks and the ensuing Shoe Bomber incident—shoelessness would make passing through airport control faster, but the airlines displayed zero tolerance for the likes of he who now had been reborn and was calling himself Ro-Non-So-Ye. Ro-Non responded to regulations by donning a pair of flip-flops for these transcontinental flights and used the same technique right through his subsequent and final move to the mountains of southern Ecuador.
Here he established the “Double Helix Office in the Global South White House” and relaunched the environmental reporting he had begun so many years before. The former Earth Read Out and Deep Bioregional Action-Examiner were remade as A Day in the Life; its daily accounts—often megabyte-sized, on topics as far afield as the Ebola epidemic, human rights violations, non-ecological education, and climate engineering—were penned, as always, in his emblematic cranky-cantankerous-comedic-flamboyant rant style. Combining the panoramic vista of an informed elder with his bent toward transcendental music and cosmic consciousness, Ro-Non also became something of an eco guru to the extranjero community in Ecuador.
But he was not well. Ever since the 1970s when popular thanologist Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross challenged the social taboo against conscious, visible death and dying, we have come to understand that communication about impending death makes its inevitable arrival not any less agonizing or unfathomable—but still somehow easier to bear. Ro-Non gave a great gift to all the folks who loved him when he penned and posted this epistle, sober and yet ever characteristic of the man’s originality:
October 31, 2014
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
… I’ve been severely ill for more than four weeks now. Especially difficult have been frequent episodes of convulsive/spasmodic coughing shaking the inside of my body quite painfully.
My main problem has been my lungs, which constantly fill with phlegm and when added to severe emphysema and asthma cause quite a problem.
I’ve had two mainstream doctors up here to my mountain retreat but they’ve been unable to improve my condition.
So Tuesday I asked for a visit from a local shaman whom I’ve known for a few years now and for whom I have great respect. What he said is quite interesting. Here’s one of his most memorable lines: “Too much compassion for plants and animals causes a lung problem.” …
So what I think we should take from this is that a much higher percentage of our current illnesses than we think are psychosomatic (or neurosomatic) rather than simply somatic. For example, we may think we’re sick from toxic chemtrail residues when actually we’re sick from these plus the neural stress resulting from having to absorb the info that those controlling us are so evil that they perpetrate chemtrails.
Certainly the news of these past four weeks has been more horrendous than that of any similar period I can remember. One of my most aware readers commented a few days ago that “Hell has come to earth.”
I’ve had information sickness several times before but always mildly: two or three days of deep fatigue, then back to okay again. In any case, yesterday morning my housemate came up to my second-floor room just as I was waking and said: “I’m scared. I think you are dying.” That same thought had occurred to me just the day before as I wondered how I was going to make it through this at 83….
On the positive side, it’s certainly a respectable cause of death: Natural World Hyperconcern (NWH).
And I’ve already arranged for my death to instigate at least one more really good party. Forty-nine days following it, there’ll be a Bardo Party for me at the Bolinas Community Center with excellent live music and potluck food. Yeah, at least my death will have some value….
Power to the Flora,
Keith Lampe, Ro-Non-So-Te, Ponderosa Pine ~ Volunteer
P.S. NYC graffiti a few decades ago: Death Is Nature’s Way of Telling You to Slow Down.
VI. THE ROARING INSIDE HER: FEMINISM
A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.
—FEMINIST AXIOM COINED BY IRINA DUNN, 1970
Women’s Strike for Equality, New York City, August 26, 1970. Photo credit: ©Diana Davies. Courtesy of Diana Davies Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.
ASIDE FROM ALL THE solid sociological, historical, and psychological theories explaining why a movement arises at a particular moment and not another, perhaps the only believable one consists of one word: magic. Indeed, beginning in the 1970s, women all over the world were, in serendipity, gathering together in consciousness-raising groups. The goal was to share experiences of our psyches/bodies as emblems of sexist society, to uncover the striking universalities—and in the process, to take control of our lives. The first marches across the Berkeley campus made little impression on me. Nor did the CR (consciousness-raising) meeting we attempted in the commune on Vine Street. It was Anne Kent Rush and Hallie “Mountain Wing” Iglehart Austin who opened my pores to the necessary tasks at hand.
Even before I read such mindblowers as Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, and Phyllis Chesler’s Women and Madness or delved into the history of the demolition of early woman-originated healing/ritual traditions, their one-liners clinched the absurdity of dominating women and revealed visions of what should be or what, before the patriarchy, was. Why is the deity touted in today’s religions a man when it is females who enact the definitive creative act of childbirth? Why is there just one overarching deity and not many as in indigenous cultures and ancient mythology? And consider this: the institution of marriage was invented as a way to own and have power over women. Does the constant threat of rape unconsciously function to keep women “in their place”? They took away the stars and tried to divert our distress by giving us diamonds. Is the subjugation of women a mirror of the oppression of animals and land? Is it because at heart we are more expressive of nature?
As our minds were pried open from thousands of years of enforced closure, we began to take action. We demanded equal pay and equal rights. We marched to legalize abortion and “Take Back the Night” from rapists, imagined voting for a woman for President, launched women-owned businesses. We sought out female gynecologists, female Jungian therapists, female architects, female carpenters, female anthropologists, female house painters—all of whom were few and far between. We bought specula to do our own cervical exams. We became adept at telling men when they had crossed the line into sexist behavior. Many women abandoned the male world altogether. We studied prehistory, wrote books, painted canvases, produced