The Sibling Society by Robert Bly
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I really do think women and feminist men will save the world. I keep seeing these nerd-type guys downtown with T-shirts on that say EVOLVE on them. And many other total weirdos, women and men. Add EVOLVE to NOW.

I was reading Robert Bly’s 1977-1996 The Sibling Society on my three-week train and plane trip to family and friends in the Midwest and South during June, and 35 years ago or more, Bly was hearing Joseph Chilton Pearce and others talk about Evolution’s End: Claiming the Potential of Our Intelligence, and the neuroplasticity of the brain, which could indeed not only abandon the lowest order Reptilian way of savagely reacting, but actually move forward into the midbrain Mammalian (hear, “Women,” “mammaries,” “community,” “cooperative,” “feminist” etc.) and on into the measured Neo-cortex human(e) being self-awareness of the homo supposedly sapiens.
And hope is really part of being human, too.

“All of us who have been angry at the fathers rejoiced at first when the fathers lost authority, but the picture becomes more somber when we realize that the forces that destroyed the father will not be satisfied, and are moving toward the mother. Mothers are discounted everywhere. (“Lock her up!” wc) When mothers and fathers are both dismembered, we will have a society of orphans, or, more exactly, a culture of adolescent orphans.”

Adolescent elders who have not been initiated into adulthood by same-sex elders of a thriving and continuous community, but have been ignored by overwhelmed parents and “educated” into consumerism by cynical, violent, hopeless and shallow images of humanity and “reality” by TV and the consumptive, surveilled and “monetized” social media spawned by the once-idealistic Internet lack impulse control and societal values. These have been discarded along with the huge, unused potential of the human, emotive, sensate spirit, body and brain working as one with our supportive environment and all the beings, spirits and stories that entails.

We have lost our souls. No one was there in our periods of initiation to accompany and guide us out of bimbohood, narcissism, violence or obsessive drug and alcohol indulgence, random sexuality and into a world where “the eyes of our mothers and fathers…sometimes said that we were worthy.
Now we look into the eyes of television, and the eyes reply almost always that we are unworthy…the soul is not prepared for what it has learned.” (my italics, wc)

But wait --- there are stories of giants and helpers. Of snake-husbands who devoured their brides. Of the wise bride who....... but, you see, you have to read it yourself, or, better yet, be told it by a wonderful elder, like Robert was for so many of us...

And now I'm going to go up to Vashon Island to be with a group of cultural creatives and hang out with Michael Meade for a long weekend to open ourselves to THE ARC OF TRANSFORMATION. Trance-formation...

A Retreat for Women, Men, Mentors and Teachers, Artists and Activists

Join mythologist and storyteller Michael Meade for this intensive four-day retreat. Life is change and each life crisis offers adventure or complacency, as we either become a greater vessel for the flow of creation or else shrink from life.

 Ultimately, the heart of the human drama concerns whether we are moving towards greater life or moving away from it. (my italics wc)

Like a long-lived snake, we are asked to shed old skins of what we thought we were in order to become our genuine self. While each turning away from the call of the soul leaves us less able to contribute love and meaning to the world around us, Each shedding reveals more of who we are at our core. (I reversed clauses in the last sentence wc) (I need to end on a positive note.)

A life fully lived requires that we redeem unwanted and rejected parts of ourselves, as solving the pressing problems in the outer world requires a transformation of the inner world. The deeper the connection to our true self becomes, the deeper and stronger our connection to both nature and the divine can also become.

Join us on this path of discovery made of stories and poems, honest speech and creative imagination, as we take an initiatory approach to the struggles of individual life and to the collective challenge of living through a time of radical disorientation and change. (my italics wc) (external quote from What the Heart Loves:)

“The path of discovery will inevitably raise the exact fears that hold the heart captive. An adventure becomes meaningful when it forces us to become ourselves…The problem involves our inability to truly trust what resides within us. Courage is a heart word…the core of one’s deepest feelings and innermost thoughts. For the heart harbors thoughts and dreams as well as feelings and emotions. The heart can be mined for enduring courage and living imagination; yet we must often be driven there by fear or despair or loneliness.” Fate and Destiny

Michael Meade Introduces this 2019 Mosaic Fall Retreat: The Arc of Transformation -- A Retreat for Women, Men, Mentors and Teachers, Artists and Activists 

“Each soul is ready to shine in its own way…” from What the Heart Loves (FB).

“It’s possible at this point in modern culture that
Most people think that we change world by changing things in the outside world. & Yet,

• Any meaningful change really has to come from the depths of the individual human soul. At least, That’s the principle that Mosaic works on – that when

o (The soul of individual people changes, then eventually those –>

o Changes move into the culture and those changes can also affect –>

o The relationship between culture and nature). & Based on that principle, which involves both

• the idea of Calling and

• idea(l) of Healing. In other words,

o people become most valuable to themselves and to other people, when they‘re responding to the call or the vocation, & of course the call is

o calling on the genius that’s embedded inside each person, but then in order to be effective, responding to the call,

o then each person has to Be really on a healing path.

• & so Each fall Mosaic …4 day retreat. To which people come together from all areas of life where Mostly people who are working on some kind of Meaningful community projects. So there are Environmentalists, & activists of all kinds but also, healers & therapists. For 4 days we come together. And

o we work on these ideas of How to respond to the Call to one’s soul to

o participate meaningfully in the World, & then

o how to bring Healing along with the efforts to make change in the world, &

o healing both to the individual and to the group, and then

• How to work at the intersection where nature and culture can come together &

 • Heal that rift that’s so serious in the modern world.

(Yessssssss.......... wc)

Bly, Robert, (1977 and 1996) The Sibling Society : An Impassioned Call for the Rediscovery of Adulthood. Vintage, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, NY.

Hartman, Joanne and Mary Claire Hill, eds., (2019) She’s Got This! Essays on Standing Strong and Moving On, Write On Mamas publications, ShesGotThisAnthology.com , San Francisco Bay Area, CA.

Lasky, Marjorie Penn, ed., (2018) You’re Doing What? Older Women’s Tales of Achievement and Adventure, Regent Press, Berkeley, CA.

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She's Got This!: Essays on Standing Strong and Moving On by Joanne Hartman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Knox Book Beat Wyndy Knox Carr The Berkeley Times, 25 July, 2019

You’re Doing WHAT? and She’s Got This! At Moe’s and Left Margin Lit

I really do think women and egalitarian men will save the world. I keep seeing guys downtown with T-shirts on that say EVOLVE on them, and many other total weirdos, women and men and pan-gendered originalists, speaking and acting defiantly in a multicultural “alternative” to the Back to the 1950’s either/or mentality touted on TV.
You’re Doing What? : Older Women’s Tales of Achievement and Adventure, was published by the brilliant and local Regent Press, Berkeley; the collection skillfully edited by Marjorie Penn Lasky to exemplify and plainly clarify how “we tell our stories to make sense of our experiences and to point the way to others.” I got the last seat in front in the PACKED lower level at Moe’s Books for their presentation reading. Though not all experienced performers, they totally rocked the house with their tales of courage and persistence through the unique lens of their own life stories.

Adoption of a biracial child and linking up with the birth families, rejecting sexism and poverty for a life of “love and abundance,” Effie Hall Dilworth’s researching and traveling to find her grandfather’s other “family trees” in China, Rose Glickman’s use of her Russian language skills to carve a way around academia’s glass ceiling and Lasky’s story of love, loss and letting go in her 70’s, how “The Inevitable Intrudes.” Stellar! Our guiding stars!
Mark Weiman has a nose for publishing spectacularly poignant non-fiction works indicative of our times. Lasky has chosen and encouraged the deeply honest and practical tales of women courageous enough to let relegation to “women’s place” fall away and ask themselves “What brings my life meaning?” and GO FOR IT, put our values into actions. Definitely “evolving” here!
She’s Got This! Essays on Standing Strong and Moving On, edited by Joanne Catz Hartman of Oakland and Mary Claire Hill of Berkeley, is less understatedly “lives of the heroic,” but far more lyrical, descriptive and crafted to evoke deep personal feeling with plenty of inner processes and relationship dialogue exemplary of “how much our experiences matter…when taken cumulatively and made public, profound social change can happen.”
These women (and one single-parenting man) select moving vignettes of powerful change points, and they sure can WRITE. I heard the She’s Got This! readers’ presentation at the Left Margin LIT salon between Vine and Cedar, a “creative writing center and workspace,” which was inspiring! A wonderful, airy and light place led by welcoming and creative folks Rachel Richardson and David Roderick, with readings, classes and open writing space. And let me tell you, the hand that rocks the cradle (or chooses or is fated not to) and has a silver-voiced pen in the other one really DOES “rule the world!”
There’s a lot of crossover between these stories, too – for example, the ones in Doing WHAT? who work for disability rights and understanding in the public, social or legal systems and the ones in Got This! who do so one to one as teachers, caregivers and family members. These younger authors break into Surfacing, Standing Strong, Moving On, Roots and Detours. If the “older” women hadn’t gone ahead and done it, with their necessities and drives as standards, the young might not have even been hopeful, or just in the moment at the crossroads, taken the same kind of option to be themselves.
Especially all of us who’ve been charged with the inspirational responsibility of parenthood looking into our newborn’s eyes. Or sometimes our parents’, grandparents’, mentors’, friends’ or our very own eyes challenging us to really engage, see more clearly and come out stronger from unexplored rites of passage, to be more than we have dared or imagined before, looking back at us in the mirror…

“Growth can proceed only if people honor that part of their soul that is turned toward the goodness, so to speak, of their ancestors, so that they know there is something essentially worthy in them, for whose sake they go through all this agony…do not lose touch with whatever good there was in our ancestors, and with that part of our own soul.” (Robert Bly)
The “tales” and “essays” contained in these two collections are guides that can lead us back to the good in our world, community and souls, and forward to live out the good in ourselves.

Bly, Robert, (1977 and 1996) The Sibling Society : An Impassioned Call for the Rediscovery of Adulthood. Vintage, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, NY.

Hartman, Joanne and Mary Claire Hill, eds., (2019) She’s Got This! Essays on Standing Strong and Moving On, Write On Mamas publications, ShesGotThisAnthology.com , San Francisco Bay Area, CA.

Lasky, Marjorie Penn, ed., (2018) You’re Doing What? Older Women’s Tales of Achievement and Adventure, Regent Press, Berkeley, CA.

Left Margin Lit, 1543 Shattuck Avenue, Suite B, Berkeley, CA 94709.

Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94704.

Regent Press, Mark Weiman, 2747 Regent Street, Berkeley, CA 94705.


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In the Company of Rebels: A Generational Memoir of Bohemians, Deep Heads, and History Makers by Chellis Glendinning
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Knox Book Beat The Berkeley Times Scheduled for 29 August 2019
 
Are you a visitor or new arrival wondering “So what’s the deal with Berkeley, anyway?” A Generational Memoir of Bohemians, Deep Heads and History Makers is exactly what you need for context and navigation here, especially; but also for grafting most radical explorations from the past 70 years onto the next 70 (if we’re lucky) as well. Chellis Glendinning may have been a curious Midwestern (Cleveland) social sciences major when she sat down in front of the national guardsmen here at Sather Gate in May of 1969, but she rose up with the fire of her mother’s civil rights activism in her belly to lead a life of “The dissenter…the one who speaks the truth no matter the consequences,” wrote and kept writing about all of it and lived that out for another fifty years.
The brilliance of this volume lies in her dogged persistence, penetrating celebration of the “archetypal…hyper-creative” and “pre institutional… in the human experience,” and the fabulous good fortune to have met, observed, conversed and corresponded with all these pioneers of the eco-feminist, mytho-poetic, bio-regionalist, utopian, social justice, neo-luddite, green, anarchist, systems theory, Native/Indigenous/Latino personal and community sovereignty and traditional culture, art and storytelling movements.

Starting with Pat Cody of Cody’s Books, who “looked like your typical, plainly dressed, liberal mother. But in reality… was a blaze of radical ideas and action,” and Charlene Spretnak and Fritjof Capra of Elmwood (yes, OUR Elmwood!) Institute, co-writers of “progressive, neither-left-nor-right” Green Politics in 1984;Glendinning moves through spangles of encounters and friendships with amazing people like a surrealistic series of beaded curtains; right up through Saul Landau, documentary filmmaker of Fidel Castro’s Cuba, contributor to Mother Jones and Ramparts magazines, follower of the Institute for Policy Studies’ “global overview” and subject of a “monstrous FBI file with all the juicy parts deleted,” undocumented workers and shamanic poets “addressing the essential qualities of anarchy, biodiversity, cultural diversity and home-grown community. Up my alley, for sure.”
How could she know all these people? And be on the ground floor and historian of all these movements? At first, I sincerely doubted she went to Bolivia with Tom Hayden, “one of the main organizers of the protests outside the Democratic Convention (in 1968) …one of the Chicago 8” and could blithely drop names from Susan Griffin and Jerry Mander to Wendell Berry and 78-year-old Ruth Youngdahl Nelson, anti-nuclear activist who shouted down Coast Guard defenders of the Trident submarine from a rubber dinghy in the Bay with “Young man, not in my America!”

Fritjof Capra, Ecoarchitecture

By the end, I didn’t even care if they were “true stories” or not. They were all moving, deeply human and superb. Even when her subjects were telling her something uncomfortably true about the planet, our human hyper-technological future or herself. The wonderful thing about them is how often she told me something I'd told myself that I'd never heard covered or hinted at in the conventional press.
I tried to “skim” these portraits mid-book, but it was impossible. From the weird to the heroic; she was there, she met them, she remembered and recreated conversations and anecdotes, quoted letters, distilled relationships and attitudes succinctly. Example: in the “The Roaring Inside Her” chapter: What did the patriarchy do to us (women)? “They took away the stars and tried to divert our distress by giving us diamonds.” Wow. Select Social Movements of the late 1900s 101, two-thirds of the real “underground” movers and shakers of the U.S.A. since the 1950s. Here’s your guide…

Knox Book Beat The Berkeley Times Scheduled for 29 August 2019
In the Company of Rebels: A Generational Memoir of Bohemians, Deep Heads, and History Makers.

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