Coming and going through Time

I live a very simple life and for the most part, as my four year old grandson say's, " I 'm OK with that." I have food and clothing, a roof over my head, family I love, big old shade trees, a small garden and a Chinese Cherry in my side yard. In addition I have a some work to do and I'm a Christian, God has made himself known to me. I have experienced forgiveness and I'm learning to forgive. Today I had a friend to talk to. What more could I want?

I was brought up by a Christian mother and a questioning father who was a self proclaimed "activist". His parents placed him in a school of Theosophy when he was three. There had been a divorce and his mother was a writer. She didn't think she could care for him herself and write at the same time. They stayed in touch but he grew up without much family experience. My father always had a concern for the underdog and the outsider and when my brother and I were children we learned to think about injustice in the world, primarily to American Indians and Africans who were brought here as slaves. When dad was a child he had thought of himself as an "Indian", perhaps as a way of establishing an identity, and when we were children we played cowboys and cowgirls with our neighbors but when we played together, we were Indians. This sense of being a member of two worlds has had strong repercussions in our lives. My brother makes stone tools- axes, arrowheads and knives and demonstrates Indian flint napping and other crafts in nature centers and is very concerned about ecology and these things were part of his life long before it they were popular. I had an inner drive to try to get involved in the Civil Right's movement in the city of Philadelphia when I was in college even though I had no prior experience with minority community and not much with the city. Most of the Jewish kids at my school were also involved. Their history dictated it and so did mine.

My former husband who I met during this time is dark skinned and an interesting mixture of Irish, Blackfoot Indian and African American. He has COPD and is in the hospital again after coming home to Masonic Village a very nice nursing and assisted living facility for just a few days.. We have been so grateful for advances in caring for this disease, especially at Temple Hospital in Philadelphia where he has had extraordinary care. I always find myself mulling over our complicated lives when a crisis comes along. He has had two wives and has two sets of adult children, one in the city and one in the country, nothing unusual in our time. Our son is practically a pacifist and is a missionary. His second son is in the Marine Corps and recently was sent overseas.

I married once. I was not yet a Christian then but came to faith about ten years later. In my generation Christian woman who were divorced were expected to follow the current understanding of I Cor. 7 which was to remain single. Today many people understand these verses differently but whenever I prayed about these matters or even sought counsel about them, it always seemed to me that in my case anyway, singleness was the best thing for my family. My former husband remarried and then he became Russian Orthodox about 10 years later and then was divorced again about 10 years after that.

I am an artist and my living room reflects my musings. Pictures go up come down all the time. I have seasonal hangings, flowers and landscapes and pictures that reflect my thoughts of the world's ethnos, my continuing concerns for the tribal people of this earth. But that's not whats moving me now. This hanging is about me, my life, my providence. So right in the middle right now is an Indian chieftan and a cowgirl, it is Sitting Bull and Annie Oakley but it could as well be Plenty Coups, the last chief of the Crow, could be me and Dad in his headdress that he made when he was a child or my former husband's relatives or most likely me and my husband. There are many other pictures in the room, an Ethiopian mother and her child and a bunch of Siberian Iris that bloom in May. Tucked into a corner of the Indian print which my former husband had made for me from my computer Art program is a recent post card of "Dead Horse Point" in Utah, huge canyons in the evening sun which blend into the colors of the cowgirl's shirt which has a pattern of ocean waves with ships in similar colors, one thing blending into another, one time blending into another, one eon blending into another, life coming and going through time.