Peg Kerr's Journal

I had a much more complex vision for this collage and am frustrated by my inability to capture it. I don't have time to try to mess with it anymore, so I am finishing with something simpler. Actually, this is one of the first times that in reality, I wanted to create a collage in video.

I have been thinking about all the connections I have--to people, to businesses, to groups, to communities. This week, I have been thinking about how so many of those connections that supported me have felt as though they have been frayed, damaged, or even cut.

My vision for this collage was a woman's hands holding a bunch of ropes, which would be labeled. Some ropes would be fraying. Two of the thickest ropes would be cut: Rob. Kij. There would be shears attacking some of the ropes, also labeled (Death. Aging. Indifference. Pandemic.) I even wanted to put in a flaming torch burning some of the ropes, labeled Murder of George Floyd.

I've been thinking about this as I've been readying to go to Minicon, feeling in my gut that it's just not the same. Rob isn't there. The girls aren't coming anymore. Many friends have fallen away. It just isn't what it used to be in the glory days.

This sounds depressing, I know. But the reason I felt the impulse to create this collage in video is that I also saw new ropes coming in to add support to the dangling woman. Eric. Chris (Delia's boyfriend). Alona (Fiona's fiancé). Zoom coffee group. New rituals. New community. New adventures. New joys. The hope of grandchildren.

I think that our challenge as we age is that we grieve the connections that are naturally lost with the passage of time. Some people don't manage to move beyond this, and so their lives get smaller and smaller as they grow older. My mom and my late dad, on the other hand, have been superb role models for me because they kept reaching out for new experiences as they aged.

They showed me that we have to resist apathy and make genuine efforts to keep reaching out and making new connections. New friends. New families connections. New rituals.

I am going to Minicon this weekend. I will see old friends, even though I will miss certain faces.

Background: sky at sunset overlaid with a net. left: a cut rope tied off with a knot. Center: a woman's hands hanging onto a rope. Right: a rope nearly cut through (a pair of shears is poised at the frayed portion)

Tether



Click here to see the 2023 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2022 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2021 52 Card Project gallery.

*Deep breath*

Okay.

This is maybe the most complicated-in-thought card I've ever done (the card is at the end of this rather long post). I will try to explain it, and doubtless, some will be TL;DR and/or I may miss the mark in explaining it (if so, sorry!), but, well, it is important to me. And it's been the result of/prompted by the sort of deep reflective inner work that I hoped this project would spark, so I'm pretty pleased with it. Both aesthetically and what it's opened deep within myself.

The card started with my tuning into one of the prayer gatherings being held at 8:00 a.m. every morning while the Chauvin trial is going on, hosted by the organization Healing Our City (some of the organizers have ties to the Minneapolis Area Synod for the ELCA, my employer, and several of my coworkers are tuning in every day).

The day's reflection leader, Rev. Frenchye Magee of Hennepin Avenue United Methodist, invited the listeners to reflect on an image, a plant growing in a fractal pattern, which is common in nature, as we considered the thought, "What we practice of the small becomes the practice of the large." Large changes, she explained, begin with the smallest changes we make in ourselves as we engage in the work of social changes and justice, and those changes spiral out, becoming an opportunity to repeat the pattern in ever-enlarging arcs of love and hope and healing that transform the world.

As I thought over the next few days about this meditation, I made the connection with what I am doing in my own life. Last week's card, Books, was about the small, laborious changes I am making in my own life to open up space for something new. This past week, I shipped off my wedding china to a company that deals with used china as part of this downsizing/changing process (see the teacup in the upper right).

"Wait a minute!" you cry in outrage. "Stop right there! How dare you turn a meditation about the changes necessary to bring about social justice into a rumination about downsizing and decluttering. How self-centered and self-absorbed can a white woman be!" Well, yes, but please give me a moment to explain. I promise I will tie it all together.

I have been studying the concept of hygge for the past couple of years, and as I have been dealing with All of Rob's Stuff, I have become aware of the Swedish term döstädning, or as it's called in English, Swedish Death Cleaning. As I have struggled to go through all of Rob's stuff, I have sworn to myself, time and time again, I WILL NOT DO THIS TO MY GIRLS. I am aware that I have to make the hard choices, the small changes--but it's not only about simplifying my life to be kind to others after my death. I need to be aware of the changes I need to make in my mentality--caring more about people than things--not just in preparation for my own death, which hopefully, will be a long ways off yet. But also it's necessary to open up space for the life I truly wish to live.

There is nothing like becoming a widow to make you think about preparing for death. I saw how Rob became less and less tethered to his possessions as he lay dying in the hospital. He didn't care to read or open his laptop, and he didn't show as much interest as expected in the gifts we brought him, certainly far less than usual.

What ties it all together was something prompted by a song included as a part of worship in another Healing Our City gathering later in the week: People Get Ready:

People get ready
There's a train a comin'
You don't need no baggage
You just get on board
All you need is faith
To hear the diesel's hummin'
You don't need no ticket
You just thank the lord
(See the ghostly train at the top of the card.) The song, as well as all the thinking I have been doing about making small changes in my life, made me remember J.R.R. Tolkien's great story "Leaf By Niggle." (You can listen to a lovely recording of the story being read here. Which is coincidentally where I got the script spelling out "Leaf by Niggle" in a font based on Tolkien's own lettering, that you see overlaying the ghostly train. Niggle's perfect leaf, dappled by dew, is underneath.)

Niggle was preoccupied by his own concerns, his hope of painting a perfect tree, leaf by glorious leaf. He is annoyed by the constant demands put upon him by his neighbors, especially the intrusive Parish. The constant interruptions cause him to neglect his work; in turn, his inability to finish his work caused him to be insufficiently concerned about his neighbors. Finally, he was called away from his work because he had to go on a long journey on a train, clearly a metaphor for death ("There's a train a comin' / You don't need no baggage / You just get on board"). It is not until he undergoes a series of small changes (in a realm that reflects Tolkien's Roman Catholic conception of Purgatory) that his heart opens up to his neighbor Parish, and in return, he discovers his Great Tree, a real living tree, as he pictured in his imagination but could not quite capture.

Luke 12: 13-21 tells the story of the rich fool, who cared only for building barns and piling up his wealth, until God required his soul to come to death, and what good did his riches do him then? A related parable is the story of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31: a rich man thinks only of his possessions and his own pleasures, ignoring the downtrodden Lazarus outside his gate until both come to death, and what good did his riches do him, in comparison to what he should have done for Lazarus? (“Business!” cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again [in Dickens' A Christmas Carol]: “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”)

What should we do for Lazarus? What should we do for Parish? What should we have done for George Floyd, who had his life cut short by death? What small changes do I need to make in my life to open myself up to them? I hasten to explain that I'm not trying to say that de-emphasizing possessions is the work here; it's part of it, but mostly I'm pointing that process out as a metaphor for the work. I hope I can escape self-absorption, and make the changes to turn my attention away from mere things to the people around me: my neighbors Lazarus, and Parish, and George Floyd. And I have to make the small changes to root unhappy patterns out my life, including, yes, the inner racism I am training myself to see, the small selfishnesses, like putting away and getting rid of the old familiar things in my life that are no longer appropriate to the life I wish to lead. And in doing so, I think I can open myself up more fully to truly seeing and helping my neighbor.

It is difficult. It will take many small changes. But death is one of the few certainties in life. It puts so much into perspective, and things become so much clearer.

(So...did I manage to tie it all together? And did you actually read through all the way to the end???)

Changes



Click here to read about the 52 card project and see the year's gallery.

I keep thinking about Lincoln’s second inaugural address, in which he said:

”...Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

I’m grieving about the property damage, yes—-the terrible loss of Uncle Hugo’s Science Fiction Bookstore and Uncle Edgar’s Mystery bookstore particularly hurts—but people are more important than property, and the protests over the death of George Floyd are righteous. Justice for George Floyd trumps everything. Echoing Lincoln: could it be that all the burnt buildings, all the destroyed buildings are divine justice, a mere drop in the bucket of expiation for the robbing of black Americans of their economic justice? The stolen wages of slavery and sharecropping, the redlining and higher mortgage rates for would be black homeowners? The denial of GI penefits, jobs and pensions?

A comment on Twitter last night: don’t expect people who are shut out of the benefits of the social contract to adhere to it.

(I’m still glad that the neighborhood watch saved the Nokomis Library last night from the knuckleheads who tried to burn it down.)

Edited to add: And I wholeheartedly append to this post naomikritzer's comments below.