Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Even though Schwarzenegger -- with his groping and weenie issues -- is the new governor of California, I haven't felt this hopeful in a long time.
Oct 10, 2003 | I used to tell my writing students to write the story that they wish they could come upon, that they wished existed in the world: because if they wrote the story and gave it away, it would exist. When they read something that made something stir inside them way down deep, they must take note, because this was a life-giving story. Life, inside them, was tugging on their sleeves, trying to get their attention.
If you are paying attention, and carrying a pen in your back pocket, life will give you great stories, or at least lovely moments, and this is a lot. As John Prine once sang, "Photographs show the laughs recorded in between the hard times; happy sailors, dancing on a sinking ship." So as Election Day approached, I waited patiently for the story to materialize that would help me deal with the specter of having George Bush for president and Arnold Schwarzenegger for governor of California. I prayed my default prayer -- Help, help! -- as if God was a wilderness guide, and I'd gotten caught in the brambles of my best thinking. And I got an answer: If you can't cooperate with grace, at least patronize it. Let it come in and mill around you. So I did, and it presented itself. I am not sure what grace is but when it arrives, it is the opposite of feeling like the smallest package on earth, all wrapped up in yourself. Grace is when something makes the now more spacious; walking the children out to their classrooms in children's church on Sunday, I asked a child named Kahari if he was still 7. He said, "No, I'm 8 now. I just live like a 7-year-old."
I laughed off and on all day, and told this story to everyone who called. It was enough to get me through the afternoon.
But the day before the election, I was feeling really defeated. Bush is president, and Schwarzenegger would likely be my governor -- what next, SpongeBob SquarePants as my mayor? Help, I prayed again, caught this time in the slough of furious disbelief, and that morning, a hummingbird flew into the house, and nearly got eaten by the kitty. But I caught it gently in a dishcloth, and set it free. That lifted my spirits, the green-throated hummingbird back in the branches again. Then late that afternoon, a fax came chugging through, and I have been in a crazily good mood every since.
It was a few pages from a book called "The Soul of Money," by Lynne Twist, a fundraiser and activist for global hunger causes. She writes of a trip she took with 18 other Hunger Project volunteers and leaders to a village in the desert in Senegal, on the western tip of Africa. Someone with the Hunger Project had arranged a meeting with the tribal leaders of the community, whose water supplies were gone, whose shallow well was dry. The village was several hours into the desert, in the harshest imaginable environment, where almost nothing grew but baobob trees, with their long leafy branches for shade. Twist and her colleagues set out by jeep, across hundreds of miles of silty orange sand that stung their eyes and parched their throat, expecting to find hopeless, hungry people in the village. Yet when she and the other workers, driving toward the sounds of drums, pulled up in their jeeps, they were welcomed by ecstatic children, women in beautiful tribal dresses, men drumming. Everyone was too thin but not starving, and they danced around the fire: The partners had arrived.
The tribal leaders sat in a circle with the Hunger Project people, in the baking orange sand. They were all men, all Muslim. The women sat in a circle behind them. The men thanked the Hunger Project for the offer of partnership in helping them to find new water sources, or to help them relocate to somewhere less harsh. There was no government help for them: They were not counted in the census, and had no vote. Their wells were nearly dry, as were the wells of 16 other villages to the east.
After a while, Twist asked to speak with the women who sat obediently behind them, who seemed very anxious to communicate something. The mullahs allowed the women from the Hunger Project to meet with the tribal women, and allowed one of their men to translate. That's all it took.
The tribal women told Twist and the others that there was an underground lake below them, beneath the sand: They had seen it in their visions. They were sure that it was there; there was no doubt. But the men wouldn't let them dig for it. Digging and making tribal decisions were not women's work -- women could only weave, farm and care for the children -- and the men did not want to waste their energy on visions. But Twist and her colleagues, after speaking through the translator in many meetings with the mullahs, finally convinced the men to let the women give it a try. The men were not happy, but they let the women begin.
Over the next year, the women dug with utter conviction, banking on their dreams. And as they scooped out buckets of sand, they sang and drummed and took care of each other's children. The men rationed the village's water, and watched dubiously from a distance as they did their own work, and most of the women's too. I imagine them muttering, and rolling their eyes. The women dug deeper and deeper, and after a year, they came to the water they had seen in their visions -- the underground lake in the sand.
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