After the Choices

On November 1, 2019 By ednafroeseIn Earth, friendship, hope, politics, writing2 Comments

The election is over now. We’ve had time to think about our choices and balance them against the ones we might have made. We’ve heard the “victory” speeches, such as they were. Within days, we also heard a few mea culpas, not enough, mind you. How is it that after such an important exercise of democracy (ideally a thoughtful, rational, and informed process), everyone – politicians, pollsters, media people, coffee row pundits – can so readily agree that the campaign was short on vision and way too long on insults and trivialities? Was that not obvious early enough to have changed course?

But it is not the post-mortem I want to focus on, although it has its place; in fact, I hope that its conclusions will definitely affect what comes hereafter. A minority government, as historians and students of current politics tell us, is a forced opportunity to learn cooperation and diplomacy out of which can come important legislation. However, nothing will get done if the shouting and the animosity don’t stop.

A distant shot of the Parliaments that includes more trees and river and sky than buildings.

I have not worked out yet whether I’m hopeful about federal-provincial cooperation or not. I do know that we need reasonable unity and focus in the 43rd Parliament, not more partisan jockeying for attention. We have pressing issues to attend to, and to have individual premiers threatening to take their marbles and go play elsewhere is not helpful.

Before the election, I suggested that we institute some poetry reading retreats for our political candidates, encourage them to get to know one another, away from the spotlights and under the influence of holy wisdom of poetry. Now I’m going to suggest some additional rituals, ones that call on our narrative imagination in different ways.

For the politicians, I recommend a private ritual of writing eulogies. (No, I’m not implying dark deeds of revenge and violent seizures of power!) I have noticed in the past that when a former or even sitting Member of Parliament dies, the eulogies spoken and written are warm and gracious, devoid of partisanship and rancor. Suddenly the enemy from across the aisle has been transformed into a statesperson of great stature and goodness. To our amazement, we hear far more than we knew before about this individual’s genuine contributions and honest efforts to create a better world.

So what if, after the election, each politician took time for a solitary, quiet retreat in which to compose a eulogy for that political opponent who had served most often as his or her punching bag in the recent campaign? That could be a first step in defusing the often pointless quarrels that have been magnified past reason in order to motivate voters. Such an exercise will not be easy.

If necessary, the composition of eulogies for opponents could be preceded by the writing of their own eulogies. What would each newly elected or re-elected parliamentarian want to have said about herself or himself? What goal, which once motivated the politician to enter the public square in the first place, would he or she like to see as a crucial point in the eulogy? Honesty and self-awareness would be required for this ritual, but I can’t imagine two qualities that I would like to see more of in our representatives, apart from, of course, a thorough knowledge of the home constituency and the constitution.

For the rest of us, I will make a different recommendation—although personal eulogy writing wouldn’t hurt us either. What I suggest will require some detective work, and considerable attentive listening. Here it is, with all its echoes of clichéd advice from previous centuries: look for stories of positive change and circulate those instead of the latest rant. Tell the Rick Mercer types to take a hike.

For example, it was a friend, with first-hand experience, who told me about a little-known goal of Saskatchewan’s former premier Brad Wall, who had decided early in his political life that he wanted to make his province the best possible place for people with disabilities. Many of us, including me, became very angry over several cuts in his last budget, such as the shutting down of our provincial bus service (STC), yet we failed to notice that funding for disability services had remained steady and even increased.

While the attention given to one group of vulnerable people does not cancel out the pain of another vulnerable group—social ledger sheets cannot be so balanced—it does remind me that premiers, like the rest of us, are not always consistent. Internal trade-offs seem an inevitable part of the job description.

The story also reminded me that we cannot possibly know all of the details, or understand the complicated processes of getting some programs through and cancelling others. Even in the age of social media when nothing seems private any more, the general public is not always aware of essentially good motives and acts of personal integrity. We should not forget the humanity of all political actors.

On a more local level, I recently heard encouraging stories of initiatives in Saskatoon that seek to ameliorate the difficult living conditions of our most at-risk residents. Whether a particular helpful measure is conceived and brought into reality by city council or by creative and determined individuals makes little difference to those who receive a hot meal (Friendship Inn asks no questions but simply serves the meal) or a place to sleep in security (The Lighthouse). We need to hear these stories.

So let’s not forget the second portion of this ritual of finding positive stories: pass them on. Admittedly, I have no right to give advice regarding social media, since I do not use them (with the exception of personal email and this blog!). Perhaps there are already a myriad of feel-good stories that are circulating, some of which are even factual.

What I have in mind, though, is the act of pointing out good initiatives in direct conversation with others, as well as passing on pertinent links to specific individuals. Admittedly, it is hard to stay cool in the middle of a heated conversation and then to retell, tactfully, some facts or stories about the object of the rant. Yet without such deliberate tamping down of anger, how shall we proceed toward the cooperation that we all say we’d like to see in our governments?

Long may our narrative imaginations flourish!

“[Marcus Aurelius] argued that the [narrative imagination] contributes to undoing retributive anger. He means that when we are able to imagine why someone has come to act in a way that might generally provoke an angry response, we will be less inclined to demonize the person, to think of him or her as purely evil and alien.
Martha Nussbaum

A photo of a solitary path through the woods.

Rituals of Choice

On October 19, 2019October 30, 2019 By ednafroeseIn hope, identity, poetry, politics2 Comments

It’s almost over now, that ritual dance of words at the heart of Canadian democracy. Except that it has seemed less like dancing and more like frenetic, vindictive stomping fuelled by fear. I refuse to take sides here; we need all sides, in continual conversation, if we are to find workable compromises. Human beings are much too diverse in their gifts and their dreams to be co-opted by one voice only. A subsequent drift toward an enforced single vision is all too likely, as history has demonstrated more than once.

And therein lies the trouble with this recent combative chorus of political voices, each of which claimed that the other voices were wrong: the volume was unmistakable, the vision largely absent. I was listening for someone, somewhere, to move beyond specific promises to a discussion of what we might be and become as a nation. Does anyone these days vote according to what might be best for our country, instead of what might bring dollars to our personal wallets?

A long time ago, long before elections, before imaginations could even conceive of democracy, when large empires became larger by swallowing up smaller, tribal nations, a certain prophet in Judah believed that systems could and would change: “Every man will sit under his own vine / and under his own fig tree, / and no one will make them afraid” (Micah 4:4). This was not quite as individualistic as we might see it these days, since the peace that would make such an idyllic scene possible was to be established on the premise that swords would be beaten into plowshares and that disputes would be settled communally—among people as well as among people groups. True, the writer assumed that that could happen only in a theocracy, but he was gracious enough—or realistic enough—to acknowledge that other peoples might choose to “walk in the name of their gods.”

The world has since known other conceptions of the common good, drawn other blueprints for a good society, attempted various economic arrangements that were supposed to deliver happiness to the many. We have learned a veritable vocabulary of politics—and the word “politics” refers essentially to the process of allocating resources among and to groups of people; that is, who gets what, when, and how is a political matter, no matter what organization deals out the resources. Politics should therefore not be a dirty word. It is always and everywhere present as we try to work out how we should live together peaceably.

Along the way, human beings have moved from smaller, tribal societies held together by family loyalties and rituals of gift-giving, to more complex societies that gradually adopted principles of ownership. We have experimented with capitalism, communism, socialism, dictatorships (supposedly benevolent and otherwise), monarchies both absolute and limited, democracies of greater and lesser integrity.

This is not the place, nor am I qualified, to weigh out pros and cons.

Instead, I would rather turn to poetry.

I am sure that we should all read more poetry, from which the whispers of holiness have never been eradicated.
Sara Maitland

In “A Ritual to Read to Each Other,” William Stafford begins provocatively,

If you don’t know the kind of person I am and I don’t know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

Various parades of current ideologies all invite us to follow something, some god. Stafford argues that our choices among those possibilities will be made blindly if we do not get to know one another. In other words, we cannot realize our potential, our calling, alone. His plural pronouns are not an accident.

Indeed, if we do not maintain our “fragile sequences,” the moral dikes we have built to hold violence and selfishness and atavistic tendencies at bay may break and allow all the “horrible errors of childhood” to “storm out to play.” That, it seems, we have seen in spades recently, on the internet, on the national scene, on political stages. There has been “shouting” aplenty, until the individual voice of reason can scarcely be heard at all.

Stafford’s poem is ambiguous with its images of patterns and lines and elephants on the way to a circus. Leaders and followers proceed, sometimes on the way to the right destination, sometimes not. One isn’t sure whether it is a good idea to break the line for an individual choice or when one should maintain the “fragile sequence.”

This isn’t an easy world, by any means, but Stafford does seem to call on his readers (since we are to read this ritual to one another, discernment clearly does not occur in solitude) to “know what occurs” and to be willing to name such facts aloud, “lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.” Such thoughtfulness is unlikely if the conversation has devolved into mindless shouting of slogans.

I have been haunted by Stafford’s final stanza for many years:

For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

After rereading those strange and wonderful lines yet again, I wonder if it might be a good idea to interrupt the campaigning and the pointless debates, in which ideas have given way to shouted “zingers,” with some poetry reading retreats.

Let’s gather candidates in each constituency, including the party leaders (each in his or her riding) in a comfortable room with soft lighting, good coffee, real food, no cameras or microphones for quiet discussion. A neutral moderator could choose the poem(s) and begin the conversation. Let there be thoughtful silences, real attention to language, good listening, respectful body language. Let there be no purpose in the gathering but to undo the problem of “if you don’t know the kind of person I am /. . . we may follow the wrong god home and miss our star.”

I could pay attention to a campaign with clear signals, spoken quietly by “awake people.”

Meanwhile, the voting booths await our yeses and our nos.

photo of bridge over a dark chasm in the woods.

Of Fruit and Knowledge

On October 6, 2019October 8, 2019 By ednafroeseIn books, family, food, gardening, hope, spiritualityLeave a comment

Originally published in Prairie Messenger on November 23, 2016, but revised now in celebration of another season of fruit that’s come to an end.

Fruit and I have close kinship; it calls to me and I answer – eagerly. As far as I am concerned, there’s no such thing as too much fruit, especially wild fruit. Family lore claims I can spot wild strawberries in the ditch along the highway through the windows of a speeding car. Small grandchildren have already learned that on hikes in the Rockies, it pays to stay near Grandma. If there is wild fruit to be had—strawberries, currants, saskatoons, raspberries, blueberries—I will find it. And will happily “steal” it from the bears who probably need the calories more than my clan and I do. My guilt over the theft, if such it is, is quickly smothered by my confidence that there are more than enough berries for us all. So far.

*Wild raspberries along the trail to Black Elk Peak in Black Hills National Park, South Dakota*

*Wild strawberry flowers, beautiful in their own right*

The reckless, extravagant abundance of fruit, wild and domesticated, never ceases to astonish me. Even granting that some fruit in a human diet is essential for vitamins and fibre, was the Creator obliged to provide so much, in such profligate variety? Or to infuse some fruits with so much juice and joy that the first bite is like sexual climax for sheer self-abandonment to sensual indulgence? The very shape and luster of fresh peaches, to take one example, is enough to make the sensitive blush, and the intensity of taste in wild strawberries or blueberries can be grasped only through experience, through knowing.

And abruptly, the biblical sense of knowing – physical intimacy – comes into play. A raspberry is not real until it is crushed by the tongue, and one is never the same thereafter (I speak here of raspberries for which one has braved the prickly canes, not the ones sold in multinational grocery stores, hybridized for their longevity, and shipped days ago). Whatever fruit one imagines that the first human pair ate in search of forbidden knowledge—perhaps a mango which drips juice everywhere, or a pomegranate whose every seed is a burst of flavor and surprise—it becomes an apt symbol for the uprush of new experience, with all its consequences.

*Strawberries and haskap berries from our garden*

Fruit and gardens: both are so symbolically rich (and wild fruit has additional hints of the illicit and the adventurous) that writers, from biblical times to the present, find them irresistible. Isaiah the prophet could find no more apt picture of redemption than the transformation of a wilderness into a garden; for St. John, the Gospel writer, it seemed fitting that the grieving Mary Magdalene should mistake the risen Christ for the gardener; and to John of Patmos, Heaven was incomplete without a Tree of Life that bore fruit every month.

As I think of writers I have recently encountered, none does more with fruit and gardens than Darcie Friesen Hossack. In her collection of short stories Mennonites Don’t Dance, she piles theological implications on top of too-skimpy pies and blushing fragile tomatoes, and deftly measures her characters by their ability—and willingness—to love dirt into fruitfulness. Those who “have no use for fruit” have adopted a soulless utilitarianism designed to shield them from vulnerability. Those with wholesome relationships, with others and with their God, are most likely to grow gardens and love fruit; they’re unafraid of sensuality and are generous of soul and habit.

What appeals to me in Hossack’s painfully honest stories about family dynamics is the recurrent insistence on hope, through the fertile, lovely gardens, in the shameless, abundant juices of fruit. Hope, for children wounded by their parents’ struggle to come to terms with their own past, is born as they learn to put seeds into the soil or gather dandelions for wine–transformational activities which Hossack associates with the creative impulse itself, often by way of a fascination with texture, not just taste, or a heightened sensitivity to color.

That last symbolic connection draws in the very nature of beauty, and raises the theological question of whether one can learn to love God without also learning to love that which is beautiful and celebrating our human sensuality. I am reminded of poet John Keats’ famous words “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” If we’re going to follow that line of thought back to the Garden of Eden and reclaim gardening as a necessary theological activity, maybe even as a prologue to love itself (since growing anything is a surrender of control), then . . . well, what then?

Already on that path is a growing congregation of earth-keepers, from backyard composters and determined urban gardeners to highly trained scientists estimating the number of years we have left before our entire earthly garden withers and all its inhabitants with it. Keats’ observation now takes on some urgency; if the interchangeability of beauty and truth is the sole knowledge necessary, then to seek and to gain that knowledge, we need to know also (through experience, through the crushed raspberry on the tongue) that we, and the beauty and truth that we must know (with all our passion and energy), are rooted in the earth, on the earth. Knowing begins in dirt.

To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.
Mahatma Gandhi

Here and There: The Puzzle of Place and Time

On September 24, 2019 By ednafroeseIn books, identity, spirituality, travelLeave a comment

Decades ago when I first discovered Canadian fiction, I read Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson with happy recognition. Back in the 1970s, I wasn’t accustomed to seeing familiar scenery in novels; characters all lived elsewhere. So when the fictional Maggie Lloyd got off the bus at Kamloops and hitched a ride into the hills to a fishing camp, I was delighted. I could actually visualize her journey clearly and recognized the names of the small towns she traveled through. Our family had camped at Paul Lake near Kamloops, and we had driven the Princeton-Hope Highway, back before the Coquihalla Highway made straight the wilderness of the Fraser Canyon.

Low mountains and pine trees along the old Princeton-Hope Highway. — Taken from the campground near Lytton, BC.

Maggie’s confidence—“I know this all and I know how to live here”—was also familiar. That’s how I feel whenever we drive into Jasper, Alberta. I recognize every bend in the road and can name most of the mountains, thanks to summer jobs in Jasper when I was a university student. I had walked its streets many times and hiked up whatever slopes were accessible in a day off. Ever since, driving into Jasper has felt like coming home, though buildings change, and Mt. Edith Cavell loses a glacier and rearranges the landscape. I love that place. When I’m there, I can barely imagine my real home in Saskatoon.

That whole puzzling business of being “here” rather than “there”. . . . How do place and memory connect? And what has the connection to do with who I am? As I pack up camping gear, I tell myself, “In two days, I’ll be in Wapiti Campground.” It seems unbelievable. Then three days later, breathing the wondrous mountain air, shivering in the evening coolness, my home seems remote, as if back there, I was someone else, not this woman who now sips her hot tea and watches the elk wander past.

Am I the only one who runs up against that disconnect, I wonder? How do frequent travelers cope? Those who go to Europe one summer and Barbados the next and Africa the year after. How do they know who they are? Or is their need for at-home-ness in a particular space less than mine?

Place and time and memory—and identity: philosophers have tangled with those magnitudes ever since human beings could think of themselves as separate from their surroundings and grasp the passage of time.

It all comes into sharp focus during the last days of planning and packing, before departure. I stare at the familiar walls of my study, that place where thought and language happen, and try to fathom that in three days or four, I shall be in wherever—Fresno, California, or Goshen, Indiana. And when I’m actually there, maybe at a conference, I wonder who I am—the woman who did dishes at the sink and chatted with her husband the day before (such are the wonders of air travel), or the woman standing at the podium delivering a paper to other scholars, who are also from elsewhere.

Time then seems to bend and waver, stretch and condense in confusing ways. The hours in the airport are time suspended, refusing to move on. The last day away is both slow and too rapid. I think: today I’m looking at orange trees by the pool; tomorrow I shall pull on parka and boots to slog through snow.

I wonder if those who traveled once by slow boats or walked or rode their camels had a more solid sense of who they were and where they were. Were they more at home in their skins, then, when all they saw was recognizable, even after days of travel?

In the opening chapter of Swamp Angel, Maggie Vardoe (not yet back to being Maggie Lloyd), stares out her kitchen window, rehearsing in her mind her careful plans, made over years, to leave Vancouver and her marriage. Every simple action of preparing supper has been done before, many times. Only an hour or two, now, before she will walk out the back door, step into a prearranged taxi cab, and begin her transformation into Maggie Lloyd, fishing camp cook hundreds of miles away. And she is aware of “time felt in the act of passing, of a moment being reached (time always passes, but it is in the nature of things that we seldom observe it flowing, flying, past),” fearing that time had “stood still, or had died.”

There are occasions in our lives when time both stands still and marches on, when who we are is about to change beyond recognition. It might not even be through physical travel from place to place; sometimes an inner journey, a private decision, turns everything around us into a different country. Who can live through such moments? Yet we all do.

I have read Thich Nhat Hanh’s admonition to breathe and be where we are, not where we plan to be or where we’ve been. “When you sit and breathe mindfully,” he says, “your mind and body finally get to communicate and come together. . . . usually the mind is in one place and the body in another.” Precisely.

No wonder that time wavers and bends and stands still. I am attracted to mindfulness, can see the freedom of living in “now-ness,” yet cannot give up the creativity that I think is inherent in our endless puzzling about time and place and self, the pieces provided by memory. I am not prepared, yet, to give up self-awareness. Not for longer than a reasonable meditation time, anyway.

On the Awe-full Bosom of Mother Earth

On August 26, 2019September 4, 2019 By ednafroeseIn Earth, family, identity, spiritualityLeave a comment

I am a dual citizen on planet earth. As a lifelong prairie dweller, I made my peace long ago with a difficult landscape. When visiting family members mock Saskatchewan as the land that God forgot, I defend not only the clichéd delights—crocuses, meadowlarks, waving wheat fields, the scent of sage, sunsets and sunrises—but also fierce winter blizzards, the spectacular percussion of summer storms, the utter lack of boundaries in the sky.

Nevertheless, when, as a young woman, I lived in Jasper, AB, for a summer, I gave my heart to the sublime and awful beauty of the Rocky Mountains as if I had been in exile until then and had only just discovered my true home. Becoming a lifelong vacationer in the Rockies seemed as natural as breathing. There I could forget the prairie’s harsh narratives of grasshoppers and drought, and my own small stories of grief. The mountains felt clean, uncontaminated by human failures (although I knew they were not); I could breathe here, I could feel the voice of the Divine.

View from the trail to Illecillewaet Glacier near Rogers Pass, BC

By the time I first read about the correlation between the essential human spiritualities and the primary landscapes—forest, plains (or desert), water, and mountains—our family had been tenting and hiking in the Rockies for many years. Those vacations had always been so soul-restoring for me, that it took no great act of discernment to know that mountains were my spiritual home. There I was often caught up in worship, speechless and ecstatic in the face of a beauty both exquisite in its changeable colors and terrifying in its physical demands. This terrain is not to be taken lightly. Rocks may be ancient and solid; they are also unforgiving and moveable in dreadful ways. Yet I loved it all, and felt loved within it.

Two summers ago, our family camped in Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park in Alberta. Above the gash of the coulee, where the Milk River flows past the hoodoos, lay the prairies, shimmering with heat, drawing the eye skyward to eternity. Apart from the trees along the river, this was closer to desert than anything we’d known before. Among the sage and grasses and prickly pear cacti lived prairie rattlesnakes and cottontail rabbits; on the sides of immense hoodoos near the river nested cliff sparrows in great colonies and pack rats in their untidy holes.

Hoodoos along the Milk River in Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park.

Writing-on-Stone has been sacred territory for indigenous peoples for hundreds of years. Their stories are etched on the rocks in symbolic pictures. On the barren tops of the cliffs, vision quests were held, and even now, recent sacred offerings left for the Creator are mute testimony of a strong human relationship with the earth.

Such a powerful spiritual place we were visiting, yet I felt only curiosity and wonder. My soul remained unmoved, as if it knew that I was an outsider, one whose heart had been given elsewhere and couldn’t be truly present here.

Then came the night when heat made sleep impossible. Under an almost full moon, I needed no light to walk the campground road. A scant breeze ruffled stately cottonwoods into soft sibilant music. Could I ever learn to love this place? The moonlight on the nearby Sweet Grass Hills across the border in Montana was – tender? No, wrong word. “Cool” was more like it, with its old meaning of chilly distance.

Moonrise over the Sweet Grass Hills seen from Writing-on-Stone.

Back in the tent, I still couldn’t sleep although I lay quietly now. Then I felt it. The very soil – so close under me, less than two inches of man-made substances between me and it – rose and fell in a rocking motion that nearly stopped my heart in fear. Those 30 seconds of earth movement were no dream. A sudden scatter of agitated voices nearby asking “what happened?” told me it was real. For the next half hour, I waited, alert now, before feeling again two or three slight shiftings, then all was still.

In the morning, I discovered that of the 6 adults in our group, all of us sleeping in light nylon tents, I was the only one who had felt the earth move. My story was greeted with courtesy but unspoken scepticism – until the next-site neighbour came over to tell us that her trailer had been shaken violently enough to wake her, and she wondered if mischievous teens had come through our site as well. When I told her what I had felt, she assumed that human hands had shaken our tent (I knew that was wrong). Later I heard other campers whose trailers had been rudely shaken wonder who the culprits had been. All who had layers of human construction and several feet of air between them and the earth had experienced the event as a mechanical one of human agency.

Then came news that an earthquake in Montana (5.8 on the Richter scale) had sent tremors even farther north than Writing-on-Stone. My “I told you so” satisfaction gave way abruptly to a reverent gratitude that I had been “chosen” to feel those tremors against my body. What was a rattling disturbance for everyone in trailers was, for a tent sleeper, an intimate pressure gentle enough not to wake anyone. If I had been sleeping, would I have awakened or would it have become part of my dreams? What does it really mean to be at one with the earth?

The next day, we hiked up through the hoodoos up to the level prairie to seek refuge from the heat in the excellent Visitors Centre.

Trail through hoodoos near Visitor Centre in Writing-on-Stone.

After a futile effort to absorb information, I volunteered to take my turn to stay outside with the dogs. Since they were content to pant beneath the picnic table, I was left alone with the land, from the grasses and sage at my feet to the towering hoodoos nearby, from the Milk River below me to yonder Sweet Grass Hills. This, this was the land that had moved and had moved me with it.

Originally published August 30, 2017 in Prairie Messenger.

Sorting Through Family Stories and Finding My Place – Part 2

On August 10, 2019 By ednafroeseIn books, family, hope, identityLeave a comment

The desk and floor in my study are cluttered again, this time not with just papers and open books—which I insist is the sign of a working mind—but also boxes of pictures and albums, old journals (mine and my father’s), and my father’s old briefcase with some ancient documents and a tattered Bible. I had not planned to delve into my family history again. I had been there and done that, more than once.

On the floor are two photo albums that belonged to my parents and my mother’s Bible.

Yet we do not choose when convergences will invite us into new layers of self-knowledge. Emails arrived. Old pictures were shared, not all of which I’d seen before. Questions were asked. Memories came back to haunt. Different stories were told that I hadn’t heard or remembered. And reminders of mortality were showing up. For some conversations, it was already too late.

It seemed wisest to pay attention and prepare myself to re-enter the shape-shifting nature of retold stories. For one thing was becoming clear: each time I have become caught up in the formative stories of my parents—and my people (the Mennonites)—some new information emerged that demanded a changed narrative. Just how that also changed my identity, my sense of who I was in relation to my family and my inherited faith story, I wasn’t always clear. But these stories mattered, whether I understood just how or not.

What I had worked out, after the third or fourth go-around, was that one’s identity is shaped in a spiral fashion. Instead of progressing in a nice, straight line, preferably upward toward greater wisdom, it is the nature of human self-awareness to keep circling back to old material, not to rehash old emotions without change (at least one hopes not), but to return to problems not yet resolved, old knotty issues that never made sense, now seen in new contexts and thus from new perspectives. Hopefully with more knowledge and greater maturity as well.

Dramatic versions of startling discovery followed by a completely new self-identity are the stuff of novels, of course—protagonist discovers skeleton in the closet (sometimes literally – see Sarah’s Key) and has to re-imagine entirely who she or he is. It’s the stuff of memoirs, too, such as My Secret Sister. Perhaps part of the reason we read such accounts so eagerly is that, on some level, we’re all aware of how partial our knowledge is of our parents’ lives, yet how important it can be. Without some sense of who the people are who raised us – as individuals and more than just their roles in relation to us – we cannot really understand ourselves.

My father’s well-worn Bible (upper left) and various immigration documents kept in a very fragile cloth wallet.

In my various explorations of family histories, I have found no actual skeletons in any closets. Mostly, what I learned about the sources of my parents’ fears and prejudices made it easier to forgive them for not being perfect parents, although I am still learning to forgive myself for not being the perfect daughter (that’s material for some other posting, if ever!).

What is more difficult is sorting through the stories of who my people are. My childhood vision of good Mennonites being led almost miraculously by God to the safe country of Canada, out of the power of the evil Communists who were destroying the beautiful, clean, and prosperous godly Mennonite villages in Ukraine is no more. That mythologized version of the story was completely revised in my mind during my four years of thesis-writing when I felt as if the self who I had been was being pulled apart and somehow I would have to salvage the necessary parts.

Why had I never known that the Mennonite villages were not small utopias at all, but were seriously divided, economically, the landowners with power in the church and community and the landless labouring class? And I had known nothing of the huge estates owned by the wealthiest Mennonites who depended upon an impoverished Russian peasantry for cheap labour, nor that the initial land grants under Catherine the Great had given Mennonites advantages that the Russian people had always resented. Small wonder, then, that Revolutionary fervour got out of hand in the prosperous, privileged Mennonite colonies.

Ironically, now that I had a context in which to ask truly important questions of my parents, I could no longer ask them. Yet would they have been able to re-examine their primary narratives? Is there a point beyond which such personal foundation stories can no longer be retold in new language? Will I know when that happens to me?

My mother’s Bible, with a list of dates of sibling birth and deaths, some cards that were meaningful to her, and a map of the Molotschna Colony where she spent her early childhood.

And now I have re-entered the stories again. I had not thought that would be necessary after our pilgrimage to Ukraine, to visit the birth-places of my parents. Yet that pilgrimage led to sharing stories with the next generation, which is stumbling into its own necessary questions. Then—oh, the serendipitous beauty of mysterious timing—came the emails from cousins I hadn’t seen in decades, if ever.

The pictures and questions and stories, and subsequent visits to libraries and museums, are drawing me into a different kind of rethinking of the family history. Until now, I had been placing myself into these stories through asking “who am I in relation to my parents?” and “who am I in relation to my people, my ethnic roots?” What was missing was connection to the extended families.

For the record: to my wonderfully discovered clan of maternal cousins – thank you! I had not realized how much my soul craved a fuller family context, which you are now providing. I had been doing my story-work alone, without the help of those who share portions of my history and half of my genes. To see my grandparents and my mother through stories told by her siblings and her nieces and nephews changes my perspective again, rounds out the landscape. Like the poet Stanley Kunitz, in “The Layers,” I feel now as if “I have walked through many lives, / some of them my own.”

A child’s curiosity can absorb some family stories; the young adult hears the same stories with idealistic disdain for bad choices; the middle-aged parent ruefully acknowledges that old family behavior patterns have not been left behind after all, but are being subconsciously repeated; and the older adult, with leisure now, and presumably emotional maturity enough to hold all sadness with respect, seeks not to achieve closure for good and all (ambiguity will always remain), but to add what wisdom is possible before bequeathing those stories to the next generations to live into however they choose.

Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.
Stanley Kunitz

Sorting Through Family Stories and Finding My Place – Part 1

On July 29, 2019 By ednafroeseIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

One of the benefits of travel is that what was once only a name becomes a real place, with sounds and smells and stories. If that name already has a history, then “travel” can turn into “pilgrimage.” The difference between a traveler and a pilgrim is that the traveler observes, experiences whatever presents itself, while the pilgrim has a destination and a search. I’m speculating here, trying to understand how it is that Rückenau and Neukirch, former names of small villages now inhabited by people who are not my people, are still part of who I am.

The connection was first made in my childhood. My Mama and Papa talked so often of their birthplaces, back in Ukraine (they called it Russia) where, in the late 1700s, Catherine the Great had granted Mennonite immigrants from Prussia generous tracts of land—and freedom of language, education, and religion (including exemption from military service). Beside the Dnieper and the Molotschna Rivers, they farmed the land and built their villages, estates, and institutions. According to stories told by the refugees who fled after the ravages of WWI and the Russian Revolution, that self-contained Mennonite world was idyllic. Undoubtedly, it now seemed so.

With only a few sepia-toned pictures to help me, I tried to imagine my parents’ world of watermelon plantations, communal pig butchering, church weddings, skating parties on the river. The Mennonite foods were familiar to me, but everything else seemed as remote as the strange “Englische” worlds I read about in library books. All I absorbed, really, was profound sadness and unacknowledged prejudices.

photo of house-barn combination in a Mennonite village in Ukraine, ca — Photo, originally in *Diese Steine* by Adina Reger, now in *Bilder Rueckenau –* https://chort.square7.ch/FB/D0697p.html

In my early adulthood, Rückenau and Neukirch re-entered family conversations. In 1972, my father’s older sister slipped through the Iron Curtain to come to Canada, leaving behind one son so she could join her other son, not seen since WWII. Five years later, my father gathered all his courage and flew back to Russia to visit the family he’d left behind fifty years ago. He returned a changed man. Having reunited, at last, with family he thought he had lost forever, he had been freed to express affection to his family here. Nevertheless, all the hard stories had to be told again, because he had finally heard their epilogues, some tragic, some miraculous. I listened, with adult ears this time.

Meanwhile, Rudy Wiebe’s first novel (1962) had opened the floodgates of Mennonite story-telling for the English-speaking public; descendants of Russian Mennonites reclaimed and reshaped the narratives of an unwillingly nomadic people. I read eagerly, eventually making Mennonite fiction the subject of my PhD dissertation. Unfortunately, in my years of study, both my parents died, first my father who had fled Neukirch alone as a young man, and then my mother, who had left Rückenau as a 12-year-old, with her entire family. All my newly acquired historical, sociological information, my increasing understanding of their once-baffling attitudes toward Russian peasants or “other” Mennonites, I had to sort through without their help. That loss still stings, twenty-five years later.

Was it even possible for me, born in Canada, to comprehend the cultural and religious forces that made my parents who they were? More and more, the effort to imagine the land they walked on, the soil they tilled, the schools they attended, the stories they heard in church seemed irrelevant, a squandering of emotional energy.

A disconnect settled into my bones. I would read no more traumatic Mennonite stories. Enough already. I felt no longing to see the “old country” that had shaped my people. Until, that is, we learned about a Russia-Ukraine tour focused on Mennonite history, just when we had concluded that one major travel adventure would be possible after all.

Rückenau and Neukirch are no longer just names. I’ve walked down pot-holed dirt lanes between ancient brick houses, a few of which are still Mennonite handiwork. Although the subsistence gardens, grape vines, chickens, and occasional cow remind me of my parents’ descriptions, I don’t delude myself that this is what the villages were like when my parents lived there. Were those homey little benches in front of almost every house a Mennonite custom? I don’t know, but my heart warmed to see that neighbourly closeness still mattered.

Yet how much of this history of those once prosperous small kingdoms, destroyed first by marauding bandits and competing armies, then by forced collectivization and seasons of hunger, belongs to me? Am I actually rooted here, where I’ve never been before and will never be again?

Admittedly, I wept before the monument built to remember the far too many dead; those dead include family members. I was surprisingly moved by the now abandoned Mennonite church in which my grandfather once preached, and even more by the old railway station from which some Mennonites departed west toward freedom and some departed east, to Siberia—to disappear.

Monument in Chortiza, Ukraine, to remember the Mennonite missing and dead from the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist era.

The problem is that the stories of Rückenau and Neukirch and all the other villages that were the whole of my parents’ world have been changed by a more complex awareness of place. For I have walked also in the palaces and streets of St. Petersburg and in the Red Square and the Kremlin; I have seen other remembrances of the dead, from ornate crypts for the czars to mass graves of the innocent and helpless. The Russian and Ukrainian peoples also endured bitter suffering as events and choices utterly beyond their control overturned their lives and ended their dreams. Mennonites have no corner on pain, not even on religious persecution.

My parents’ stories of pastoral security and unfathomable loss are now set beside the losses of the Russian peasants who also dreamed of a better way of life on land they deeply loved. Rückenau and Neukirch—the Winter Palace and the Kremlin: how shall I hold these names in my mind, with their interwoven stories? I still do not know.

Originally published in Prairie Messenger, March 29, 2017

Hunting for the Perfect Souvenir

On July 9, 2019June 25, 2019 By ednafroeseIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Okay, there is no perfect souvenir—at least not one that can please everyone without insulting either a particular vacation spot or our entire environment. Yet we keep hunting and buying. That’s why every major tourist attraction is surrounded by a village of souvenir shops, each stuffed with key chains, decorative spoons, moustache mugs, t-shirts and pyjamas, ash trays, paper weights, thimbles, fridge magnets, and other little do-dads that are designed to sit on shelves just to announce to all and sundry, “See where I’ve traveled.”

The motive for buying cheap trinkets as gifts for others is somewhat different. Likely back when travel for most people was rare, the notion arose that if a traveler had money enough to visit some exotic location far away, said traveler should have money enough to bring back gifts to all the family and the house-sitter and various friends. Let the shopping begin.

And we can’t ignore the human instinct to collect. Sooner or later, whether as child or as young adult, the traveler declares, “I will buy a souvenir spoon from every place I visit” or key chains, or pennants, mugs, letter-openers, salt and pepper shakers. As any collector knows, the collection must then be displayed. Remember when kitchen and dining-room walls were decorated with spoon racks, plate racks, or little shelves on which to place thimbles and tiny dolls?

I point no admonishing finger here—I have bought my share of souvenirs. However, there came a day when I stared at our three full spoon racks and asked myself, “And just what will our children do with those spoons when I die?” Who will care two figs for dozens of coffee spoons, too fragile with their glued-on miniature shields to be used or ever washed? My disillusionment, which ended my collecting, had two other sources. One was the ongoing nuisance of replacing spoons on the racks when someone or other had once more knocked several onto the floor – to say nothing of washing and polishing them.

The other was an awareness of diminishing returns. When I began, it was a way of reminding myself that yes, I had indeed spent time at Lake Louise and I had seen Craigdarroch Castle. But, given that we typically camped and hiked in the Rockies, there was no need to buy a second spoon from Lake Louise. Meanwhile, extended family had taken note that I was gathering spoons and suddenly they knew what to give me. How convenient. So I began to “collect” spoons from places I had never visited and likely never would be able to. The spoons were no longer reminders but temptations to jealousy and resentment. Of what possible use or meaning was it to me to own a spoon from Arizona or South Africa?

A few years ago, when we re-did our kitchen, the spoons were packed away to become playthings for grandchildren, and the racks went to Value Village to take their place among thousands of other knick-knacks that had lost meaning for their original owners and would have zero meaning for anyone else.

In my university student days, I had had the good fortune to spend two summers working in a tourist town. Jasper was small – I could hardly walk anywhere without passing souvenir shops—all of them cluttered with plastic or ceramic or paper stuff, most of it made in China, all destined eventually for some landfill. But there were other shops as well, and I began to see the difference between appalling kitsch and carefully crafted original art. Fifty years later, I still wear, with pride and tender memories, a gift from my roommate who worked in the local gem shop—a star-shaped goldstone necklace.

photo of the star-shaped goldstone pendant necklace

So, the perfect souvenir? Here are the three principles that now guide my purchases of souvenirs—yes, I still do buy a few! First, always choose something locally made. Tourism does bring substantial economic benefit. Make sure it goes to local residents. Often the simplest choice is something consumable, like local jams or syrups. If it isn’t welcomed by the recipient, then at least its disposal will cause less harm than other items.

Choose something genuinely useful. My most valued souvenirs are two shawls I bought in Russia, one from a street vendor in St. Petersburg and one from a shop in Moscow that prided itself on well-made, artistic goods. I have worn those shawls many times, each time remembering my conversations with the local women who sold me the shawls. Someday someone else will enjoy those shawls, whether they know the stories about them or not.

photo of author wearing a Russian shawl.

When neither the consumable nor the useful is just right, choose beautiful works of art, made by local artists. Such gifts can hold meaning for the recipients as well as for the travelers. I treasure the small wall hanging made of tufted moose hair that our daughter-in-law brought us from Yellowknife, because I am both grateful for the gift and awed by the traditional skills of the local artist who created the work.

photo of wallhanging made of tufted moosehair flowers.

These principles will mean spending more money than what it costs to buy imported snow globes or jokey postcards. Maybe we need to consider buying less, overall. That’s the best option for the environment, surely. Memories can be treasured through other means than more stuff. Could we learn the art of telling good stories? Could we practice being entirely present in the places we visit? Take time in our vacations to chat with local people who serve the tourists, instead of hustling from store to store?

I have not forgotten the kindly people I served lunch and dinner to in Jasper, all those many years ago. Admittedly, I was not very patient then with stupid questions about why Mt. Edith Cavell had sand on it (had they never understood that tall mountains have snow on them?), but I was grateful for those who saw me as a person, asking about my experiences or telling me about the meaningful moments of their day, like seeing fawns in the forest or being awed into silence at the top of the ridge they’d just climbed. In the end, it is the relationship among people that matters. Let’s put that ahead of more stuff.

At some point in life, the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.
Toni Morrison

How Much Is a Picture Really Worth?

On June 18, 2019 By ednafroeseIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

How dare I ask such a question when as a child I had pored over the few black-and-white pictures my parents had brought from the “old country”? When these days everything, including food, is photographed and shared, and when scrapbooking has become a small cottage industry? When I likewise treasure every photo of our grandchildren? When I consider photography a much-valued art form and try to compose my own photos artistically? When no one seems to argue the truth of “a picture is worth a thousand words”?

Nevertheless . . .

I’m troubled by what we do for a photo and what we lose in the process.

When I was a student, working summers in Jasper, Alberta, I had my first taste of being a “local” in a tourist destination. Having spent spare hours hiking in the daytime and lingering on the lakeshore in the evening, I had learned to love where I lived, considered particular mountains my friends.

Then to see a tour bus pull up in the parking lot beside the most stupendous waterfalls in the country and watch tourists pile out to take pictures of one another in front of the sign, before getting back into the bus, was both amusing and horrifying. What would the picture-takers say when they showed their collection to hapless friends and family back home? They hadn’t gotten close enough to the falls to feel the spray, let alone climbed alongside and felt the thunder of the water on the rocks.

Decades later, coming back to those beloved places with our grown-up children and watching tourists still posing in front of the falls, but now with a selfie stick that made cooperative fellow tourists unnecessary, I wondered what drives such compulsive picture-taking. What does one do with two or three hundred photos of oneself against a changing background?

During a recent tour in Russia and Ukraine, we visited Peterhof, arriving precisely at 11 o’clock in the morning when the music begins and 64 gilded fountains in front of the Grand Palace are turned on in a glorious choreography. Like all other tourists crowded on the bridge over the canal to get the best view, I was trying to take pictures. In frustration, I began taking pictures of the other tourists, all of them taking in one of Russia’s seven wonders through a digital lens.

foreground is tourists holding cameras, taking pictures, and background is the palace in Peterhof, Russia.

When we entered the Grand Palace itself, we were told that photos and videos were strictly prohibited. As I slipped my camera back into my bag, I felt my disappointment change to relief. I owed no debt to the friends who would ask eagerly, “did you get lots of pictures?” I could forget about “capturing” the experience and simply be there, let myself be awed, watch the faces of my fellow travelers, listen to our guide, and absorb the beauty, without a thought for the morrow—knowing that I would remember.

On the same tour, I observed fellow travelers ignoring the autonomy and privacy of local Russians and Ukrainians and surreptitiously taking photos of those who had refused to be photographed, just as they had also recorded singers who had forbidden all recordings. Who do we think we are that we can treat all experience as ours to hold and to keep for our own ends?

In 2011, back in Jasper again, our family witnessed the raising of the new Two Brothers Totem (the old Raven Totem having been returned to the Gwaai Hanaas after nearly 100 years), in a solemn, sacred ceremony. The dense crowd, with all the upraised arms with cameras and phones, resembled a strange humanoid forest.

Author’s photo of raising totem pole in Jasper, AB

Then, just before the prayers began, the emcee made it clear that taking photos or videoing was now prohibited. Indeed, several Indigenous men were standing here and there on rocks or chairs to scan the crowd for compliance, a measure I assumed should have been unnecessary. I was wrong. Several people continued taking pictures, blandly ignoring instructions, even becoming annoyed when they were confronted, as if their rights had been denied.

Suddenly, Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water came to mind. It’s a complicated novel, with humor, interwoven Indigenous myths, slyly hidden historical allusions, and a mischievous Coyote interfering in ordinary life. A dominant theme is the function of photography: the Blackfoot prohibit cameras and videos at Sun Dances, frustrating white tourists intent on getting pictures. King’s deft mockery exposes the essential act of possession that underlies our picture-taking, a strange greed that demands ownership, even of that which does not belong to us.

King also makes it clear that photos do not, contrary to arguments of would-be reporters, explain the Sun Dance to outsiders. Understanding is gained only by being there, staying with the people in their teepees, sharing their meals, joining the circle of watchers around the dancers in the center. No photo can ever offer the sounds, the smells, the feeling of the wind in the hair, the warmth of the sun on skin, the smiles in the eyes of new friends.

Which raises another question for me about photography as automatic holiday record-keeping—even if we respect others in our picture-taking, what are we losing along the way?

Wendell Berry, in his poem “The Vacation,” depicts “a man who filmed his vacation.” As he flies down the river in his boat, video camera held to his eye, he’s “making / a moving picture of the moving river,” showing “his vacation to his camera.” Thanks to the video, the man has “preserved” his experience. It will always be there for him to look at “with a flick / of a switch.” There is, however, a problem: “he / would not be in it. He would never be in it.”

his camera
preserving his vacation even as he was having it
so that after he had had it he would still
have it. . . . .
[but] he would not be in it.
“The Vacation” by Wendell Berry

Originally published in Prairie Messenger, January 24, 2018

The Other Me

On May 20, 2019 By ednafroeseIn books, friendship, identity, spiritualityLeave a comment

Two friendships converged in a berry patch, and I was sent out to examine the moral worth of a book friendship.

My friend and I were swapping stories of our childhood reading habits. As Saskatoon berries fell into our pails and our mouths, we both confessed that we had been distraught on winter Sunday afternoons if we ran out of books, and that we had reread favorite books until the covers fell off. We also discovered that although we had both loved Mara, Daughter of the Nile, by Eloise Jarvis McGraw, neither of us had ever heard anyone else speak of it. After wondering why two teens, one a Catholic and one a Mennonite, would be so taken by a story set in ancient Egypt, we talked of other books.

Yet Mara, the pretty slave girl of Egypt, did not leave me so easily. To use the language of Wayne Booth in The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, I once spent a great deal of time in her company. Friendships, including book friendships, Booth suggests, offer us three kinds of gifts: pleasure, profit, and the “kind of company that is not only pleasant or profitable, but also good for me.” So what gift had McGraw given me through the fictional Mara?

Book friends offer us pleasure, profit or gain, a ‘kind of company that is not only pleasant or profitable, . . . but also good for us, good for its own sake.’
Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep

After all, she was nothing like me, nor did her circumstances resemble mine. An untameable slave, she was impudently self-confident and utterly unscrupulous, bent on looking after herself. Thanks to her cleverness and brazen charm, Mara became a double agent spy, purchased to seek out treason against the reigning Pharaoh Hatshepsut while choosing to carry messages for precisely those treasonous agents of Hatshepsut’s half-brother Thutmose, kept in virtual palace arrest.

Photo of book cover of Mara, Daughter of the Nile, showing a lovely Egyptian girl in expensive clothes.

The novel is plot-driven, suspenseful; betrayal by anyone would mean death for someone. Exotic location, jewels beyond description, romance, adventure: all the necessary ingredients of escape reading. Perhaps this book-friend’s gift was merely the pleasure of leaving, for a time, my own drab, narrow world.

That berry-picking conversation provoked a hasty and successful book hunt. My curiosity had been piqued: would Mara still hold my interest, now that I was grown up and educated enough to teach sophisticated literature in university English classes? Well . . . evidently the sophistication hadn’t taken. Once again I slid effortlessly down the rabbit hole of Mara’s ancient Egyptian world, and I cared as much about her eventual happiness and security as I had when I was fourteen. In fact, I still delighted in watching Mara secretly read forbidden books, engage in daring repartee, and invent creative lies for both her masters.

After rereading it yet again, I couldn’t help pondering the emotional processes at work here. Wherein lay the charm? It was true that I had once also secretly read forbidden books and told lies to cover certain activities, so that Mara’s utter lack of guilt might have been reassuring for me. But beyond that, what could this friendship have offered to me? It was time to abandon the reader’s initial naiveté and ask harder questions.

To begin with, I could at least look again at the novel’s underlying assumptions about gender roles. And then it was obvious that Hatshepsut, as a woman, was obviously less worthy of the throne than her brother, and that the handsome Lord Sheftu would retain all the real power while Mara would become his lady of leisure, suitably preoccupied with jewelry and costly linens.

In my teens, though, living among Mennonites typically suspicious of luxury, self-indulgence, and beauty, I had seen only hope in such a conclusion. Part of the novel’s allure lay in Mara’s ability, by will power and love, to achieve about as much success as was possible in a man’s world that, at its core, was not that different from my world after all, if one ignored the trappings of royalty and military aggression.

Even the religious devotion to and fear of the gods of Egypt, although I had understood little about such pagan beliefs and would have dismissed them as ridiculous, had I paused to think about them, were not that different from my own fearful attitudes. Desires and contingencies and impulsive actions played out against an unquestioned spiritual backdrop in my world and in Mara’s.

She, however, recognized that life was about love here and now, and was prepared to take risks that I could not have imagined. She could act decisively as I could not; what’s more, she was learning to put aside self-preservation for a greater good. Mara had become my friend because I felt I was a better person in her company, one of the qualities by which Booth suggests we should evaluate our book friends.

In any case, whether or not the plot was believable—I didn’t care if it was or wasn’t—whether or not the novel supported patriarchy, I saw Mara as the lovely fearless young woman that I wished I could be, clever enough to make a crucial difference in how the world unfolded, and beloved by the man she loved. Who wouldn’t want an ending like that?

Besides, without really noticing the novel’s moral underpinnings, I had been deeply gratified to see the former slave, now an aristocrat, negotiate for the freedom of another slave, and for the return home of a lonely alien woman caught in palace intrigue. Mara understood more now than just the value of freedom and personal integrity; she, the former waif and guttersnipe, had also grasped what home meant and how important it was to belong and to foster belonging.

That was what my book friend, my other self, was trying to teach me all those long years ago when all I had looked for was escape.

The author, at age seventeen, on the family farm.

Originally published in Prairie Messenger, August 31, 2016.