My Enge painting also has a twin. This is so peculiar. The Mona Lisa's twin is so eerie. Just discovered! Check this out!

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/02/146288063/painting-sheds-new-light-on-the-mona-lisa

Unfinished – I know it is approaching greatness, on the road to wonderful, only when I see my writing as unfinished art.
Listening – We only hear in the rare moments when we are able to calm the instinct to control the bustle in our mind, and let the conversation run. Body: Photos over time – This is the story of me, a woman who sees my body pressed against a backdrop of age and time. I have a picture of myself when I was a slender seventeen. I am at the land trust community farm where my mother and I used to go and hike. My sister Dani shot that picture. She knew how to catch me when I was in a moment that I would stand the test of time, that would mean something to me later. I stand there under the porch of the hundred year old house, reaching out my fingertips to the rain that falls there. My mood was melancholy then. But pensive, hiking, feeling rain as it came down off the tin roof. I guess I heard the melody it makes there. I guess I saw the willow tree down there, with a similar beauty and sadness. In another image Dani took, I am sitting on a manmade sand dune near the ferry end of the island at Ocracoke. I have the same down feeling. But sometimes being glum is not a horrible thing. Recently, over Winter Break, I got up in the middle of the night, disrobed, and made raw outline sketch paintings of my raw naked body. A headless, legless, Venus of Willendorf type outline, almost resembling a smile. When I think of my body over my lifetime, almost 30 years, I see it has transformed with both a connection and simultaneous disconnectedness to my emotion.
There are lots of pictures of my eleven year old self, or earlier. This prepubescent girl is who I see when I think “inner child.” I see a power in that girl that I am just recovering. She does gymnastics like many young girls do. And like many, she started too late to be competitive. This is a good thing. Stretching and bending her body in numerous positions, she is a work of art. She arranges herself in a backbend, then folds on the grass of a neighbor’s back yard. She flips her feet over her head in a cart wheel. She is flexible as a clay doll. Her muscles aren’t strong enough to do all the moves her peers can do. But the important thing I remember about her then is in her pluck and confidence. She is a tom boy, having recently read of Tom and Huck in books she found on her parent’s shelves – she spits like her dad. Later I read To Kill a Mockingbird and see myself in Scout, the plucky, wide eyed heroine.
I want to get to be sixty and ninety. I want to carry all of these selves along the way. I want to be more and more spunky and alive until the day I die. In wit, in loving, embodied.

Dear 17 year old Maggie, Congratulations on graduating high school and the good grades and the steady job lifeguarding. Maybe you can give me a tip or two someday!
You are heading to your family’s annual trip to Ocracoke Island. They have been going as a family for 16 years of your life. You are adding up those years in your mind thinking you will spend half a year on family vacations before you die at 90 or 100. There will be a time when family beach trips are too hard for you, when you will not be able to handle that much family, and eventually when you will take time away from this vacation. I cannot help you I don’t think.
I just want to comfort you, like anyone when I think I have insight on them that they might not see. I encourage you to forget these words like they are a dream that evaporates in the morning, dew on the windshield. No one can protect you from those rough waters. This is not a place for blame and there is no need for apology. We did our best – you and I and all the people in between. There is no blame because you always will keep your promise with life. This is just a quick note to encourage you.
You are strong in every way possible. This is a theme in your history of being. You will always have a calmness in you and a fire, available. You are intelligent and beautiful. I have good friends just a few years older than you. And I take classes with a number of people just around your same age. Every now and then I will see a young woman who reminds me of you. I want to help her realize who she is, what is and will be a constant part of her. You will always be a writer. You will go into other fields of study, even to the point of agonizing with the question of choosing a college major. Don’t ask me how I know this. Just a guess based on my own life. This is a huge part of who you are. You will also come to identify with other highly emotional people. You will spend a whole year studying Psychology writing papers about your identity with limited truth.
Farmer’s Almanac for your soul. I know you don’t remember me and might be wondering why I am writing this letter. Don’t worry about that too much. I may be a stranger to you here, but I know you well and I am rooting for you! I know this sounds arrogant and/or confusing, but I would rather be me than you. Take comfort in knowing that, ok?
Puravida! a future Friend

I I am riding back from dinner and a movie with Elizabeth Vega. She is forty five and speaks to me about all the things that have happened to her in the last five years. I notice a yin yang pattern, an oxymoron of life and death, in the things that she tells me. At forty she broke up with a man of a five year relationship; she fell in love with another man. She became a grandmother; her grandmother died. I interrupt her, caught up in my own 1 AM thoughts.
“Elizabeth? Do you think I ever will fall in love?” I begin explaining my question over a context of relationships and people. She knows me well enough to pin a truth on me.
“You’ve got to be open to it.” It is so easy to splash the truth on the face of someone else like icy cold water. I am closed. I hide so much. I lie every second, not in what I say, but in what I don’t say.

II Now I am sitting on my bed with butterfly bended knees, with a laptop keeping my feet warm. When we were in the theater, I was thinking at a thought that has been growing in my mind. I healed myself. I had so much help along the way. Overcoming bipolar disorder as much as I have has taken such a combination of drugs and factors, of people watching their little sister, their little girl, their friend do things that made them wonder for years where their girl had gone. And all along, I was required to grow up, as is forced on the 18 year old with the mindset of a child. So yes! Much of my survival was my sister and brother keeping me on a remote farm cove house, naively hoping I would drop out of it. People who knew me in all of my personal shapes and sizes looked at me then and said I was gone. Mental illness is something that takes a lot to understand. After the hospital, I felt they looked at me differently, with stigma. When people return from war, we are so much different. I was changed. They did their best. And so did I. I healed myself. Without my medicines and support, I would never have made it. But without my determination, my love of life, my prayers and hospital yoga, I would have cut myself to pieces like so many people. I was hospitalized for four episodes, if I count right, and I am proud to say that I lied every time when I entered the hospital. People must be suicidal or homicidal to be admitted there. I never gave up on myself, and fortunately, found a path past that violent anger.
When I was hospitalized, my priorities were smartly set. I needed to fix my mental state at all physical costs. The medicines were not good for my body. I grew strict with myself strict in many ways. I was so afraid of losing my mind again, that I kept my virginity. I kept my body clean of coffee until about three years ago. I had been to Costa Rica where huge tracts of rain forests are lush and protected with easements. I had a contract with myself, an attempt to keep sane and stable. I would make straight A’s at the college there. I would do nothing social. Even when my friends found me, when a band of anarchists came my way, I maintained a straight edge. Even when I took breaks from school, semesters, years at a time, I went to bed by midnight. I would not compromise with my need for nine hour nights. I rose with the sun. I did not see chocolate chips or greasy foods as involved at all in my mental well being. I grew twice my original size. I was for a long time afraid to crack a joke. I was for a long time afraid to laugh, afraid of my mania, afraid of who I was, of who I could be. Children made me nervous. I started to drive a Honda Accord with three colors of rust. I slapped stickers on the bumper. A series of stickers that have faded or that I peeled off for change. My mother bought me the car so I could commute to college. I never bought her anything significant. Nothing up to the scale of what she gave me. I lived with my mother for years. I resented her because the house was small. I resented her when I learned the best thing for my insomnia was to write the night through. Living there made me unstable, but it was not my mother’s fault at all. I was largely unstable from my deep paranoia of being out of control.
I called the car she gave me Independence because that was what I wanted deep inside. But I had no idea how to achieve it.

III. I am so hard to contain, so stubborn and willful. But for years I lacked the kind of independence that risks laughing at the expense of worrying family people I might develop a mania. I got my first adult friend, a woman my age who knew what to tell me to help me grow. Until that time, my relationships were so stunted, unequal, full of conversations with only one person talking. She made me listen and asked challenging questions. Out of love. I joked that I could pay her for these therapeutic phone calls. It felt good to laugh. We earned about the same amount of money then, and I did pay her a few times for her labor of love.
I picked up another friend, a mother of an eight and a six year old. Both friendships have the air of permanence for me. I began learning how to be socially normal. I embraced my differences.
I did an internship where I learned about my capabilities. There were things I had written off as possible. Like coffee late in the evening, or letting my insomniac energy roam. There were three other women all growing in their own manner and capacity. I developed some interpersonal conflicts. Being so isolated there with them on that mountain top did not help. Meditation Rock changed my views of things, for sure, if just for the green rolling valley it exposed to me. I loved to go there and listen to chickadees. I learned to be wild, as one of four women dancing in the nude, playing baseball with the other employees, stealing Lauren’s ice cream from the refrigerator and watching her liquored up, vulgar reaction, being verbally coached by Lauren and Dylan on pleasurable masturbation, supporting a tearful Tessa when I did not know I had it in me, withdrawing emotionally, surviving.

IV.
When I bought the painting, Jeff Enge gave me the first good pot he ever threw. I called it my Winnie the Pooh pot until, of course, when it shattered on the pavement that same evening. I knew the symbolism immediately when it fell and broke. I had just impulsively purchased a 300 dollar painting. It meant to me that I needed to take care of myself. I know now that means my whole self, especially my body.
The wise people I know always told me about my need for holistic healing, holistic being. I cannot say that I have solved that riddle yet. I need to take care of myself, for sure. But how do I best go about doing that, when my body craves red meat and soda and my once sacred spirituality is caught in a fight against proselytizing Christianity. I healed myself – to a point. But I did not heal myself entirely yet. However, tonight, I unwrapped Elizabeth’s riddle. We saw a movie about a young boy seeking out something that was not real or plausible. Yet, the boy found it in himself. He found his strength and his love and his compassion.
My life too is a riddle, with that general conclusion. I hold the lock. I don’t have the key. I walk by myself in this little town of thought and paper. I can only solve one riddle a day. I don’t have the answer here, yet. How can a latch learn to open?

Change is so

impossible

to avoid,

like a fire

burning in a

neighbor's chimney,

like a poet's

imagination, watching

a squirrel skittering wild.

In yo face -- my Facebook performance "git" -- GIT OFF'A Facebook! fer Shy Jo

Dear Larry Shinn and world at large,

My initial instinct on the issue of Jason Cohen's tweet was that students offended by the incident would be best to forgive instantly and find compassion. I am not saying you (we) need to feel guilty for our white privilege, but I am afraid faculty at this school is ostracizing students who speak out with the kind of activism for which we should be proud. I am saying that the tweet unearthed a lot of discomfort around racism that needs to be addressed.

It is easy for me to forgive, to find compassion at the drop of a hat. I have this privilege. But privilege is not the same as entitlement. It has taken me a long time to come to this. But the truth is racism is alive and present at Berea College. Overt racism and institutional racism both exist. This college does not have as many minority professors as it used to. Those numbers are actually going down. Many of you know people who were involved in the civil rights movement. My mother called the white folks who fought for civil rights in the 60's "white knights." Those civil rights activists were integral to the movement, and should be role models us today.

If you don't understand why the majority of white Bereans are apathetic on this issue or are uneasy and defensive then maybe you should study that a little. Maybe you should go back to college on that subject. The people who come here to this college are the most diverse I know. I have student friends here who were homeless, who are gay and lesbians, who are disabled mentally and physically, who are black and white, who are Christian and Muslim and of every religion, who are from countries I never knew existed, to be honest. Each one of these things holds a strong grip on our identities. We ALL need role models here, even in our adulthood. Having Obama in office gave African Americans everywhere the audacity to hope, granted them a sense of possibility.

If you see a white anglo saxon protestant future in the vision of the mission of Berea, by all means, hire more white men, more wives and husbands. Continue the legacy of nepotism. But that is not what your mission statement says, it is not the word your public relations department is spreading.

I don't usually lecture like this, on a soap box or pulpit. But now as I am realizing these things to be true, it seems these words need to be spoken. I think the symposium should be mandatory for all students.

<please, re-post as you may. I no longer use facebook>

in Truth, Maggie Hess

School or writing? I will either graduate or I won’t. But I will always be a writer. I neglect certain subjects that I want to know, subjects whose matter I am passionate about. The problem is I have so many words in me that crave my hands writing them. Sentences that would be covered by time or snow if I was not there to shovel them off for the country to look at, to take in, and recycle. Homework, vacuuming, and other sensibilities should be avoided at all costs, like the male dog with his leg erected or a coal fired power plant spitting dust. These things abort the life that could come, naysay the naissance.

We all write differently. Some like me burn a fire inside that desires kindling. Others like me also when deadlines and word numbers rule the roost. This can be a damper on our creativity and on the flame of life that pulls syntactic gluttony from the menu of our imagination. But meticulous writing doesn’t have to leave the soil of our words cracked or arid. Meticulous is only a couple syllables from melodious. Though I come from a place of friction and heat, creative writing can just as likely sprinkle down with intended precision. Probably then I should do more editing than you. But we can get to the same place. You absolutely do not have to be manic depressive to be a writer.

We distinguish ourselves with personal features that separate us from others. Our identities are built of unique traits. That is how I came to identify with bipolar disorder. Quite it was such a prominent part of my life for so long that it is challenging to put my finger on what I am today.

I think it is normal for people to long to identify with other people who share something with us. When I was first attending Quaker Meetings, I began to consider myself a Friend, or a member of the Religious Society of Friends. This meant a lot to me because historically Quakers played a pretty big role. Quakers were involved in some serious social change movements. As early as George Fox, the man who founded this religion, Friends have refused to remove their hats even for the king of England. In the United States, Quakers were influential in the movement against slavery and for women’s suffrage as well as the civil rights movement. In 2001 I traveled to a settlement of Friends in Monteverde, Costa Rica where I lived for a semester. I never really explored outside walking range, but was known to walk up to twelve kilometers a day at that time.

In Monteverde, I attended a Quaker Meeting but learned a good deal more than just to identify with the Quakers. I lived so near the rainforest, walking with my sister in the Busque Nubosa or cloud forest preserve; I appreciated nature and learned about ecology. I did not know it at the time, but I would take this appreciation with me back into the United States. Later I would find it was difficult to untangle the bipolar disorder and culture shock from returning to the States. It would be a challenge for me to separate those mentally ill thoughts and feelings from a budding environmentalism, activism, and religiosity.

In Costa Rica I lived with my sister, a botanical artist who was determined to add meaning to my life. She encouraged me to pick up fallen epiphyte flowers, scattered on the path from fifty feet up in the canopy. I was her assistant. I ended up in her artwork, sometimes positing, other times unexpectedly, gazing over the edge of the continental divide. There were places where we could stand and visibly see the Pacific Ocean to our left and the Atlantic Ocean to our right. The beauty of places such as that, and many Appalachian locations quite honestly, are so stunning, they harbor a home in the human soul. My identity is composed of scenes like those: reasons for fighting, for gripping onto nature, grappling with factors that make the environment unhealthy.

Everyone who ever has spent a week in Monteverde seems to have seen the Howler Monkeys there. But Anna and I experienced a deeper wilderness. We spent all day wandering paths that Anna navigated like an expert. At one point hundreds of migrating white faced monkeys converged with our path. Anna told me to sit tight, knowing the wild animals could grow defensive if they felt threatened. I sat tight. They swung through the forest for almost an hour. They left me shaking, quaking quite literally, and trembling at their power.

I mention these things because this trip changed my life, my world view, and my experience of nature. For the longest time after this trip abroad, I was hyper conscious of limiting my use of material possessions as a personal attempt to boycott the behaviors that hurt the environment. Today I think I could use a refresher trip to Monteverde. Many people who go abroad get an understanding of the global meaning of poverty. I must say I too gleaned that understanding. But I walked so much, I spent every waking moment in the woods, spotting flocks of parrots and rare animals, I learned so many plant names, I became so familiar with the wilderness and these things are so distant for me today. In fact I write this in a coffee shop, noisy with voices and music, cluttered by spinning fans and food people would be better off not eating. Maybe there is a coffee here from Costa Rica; maybe it is fair trade. But my memories in me are fading. I can write down what Costa Rica means to me, but I need a refresher course to infuse it in my soul.

One day, around Easter 2001, my grandmother was dying. Anna and I walked down the road of our rental house. Usually we walked up the hill towards one of the established nature preserves. But Anna wanted to see the unusual temperate boreal forest the other direction, down a way I had never been. We walked in silence. Anna, usual set on educating me about biology and rarely quiet, seemed somber. I trailed behind her observing trailers where people lived and farms of cows. We got to a point where the trail met a view. Because of the lay of the land in Costa Rica, views can be stunning beyond words. I remember making a promise to the land in the height of my ego. I said I would return to that mountainside overlooking San Luis and ultimately the Atlantic Ocean. I promised to protect that view, to use the “American privilege” Anna encouraged me I had, and to use the privilege for good, to return for the land.

It is eleven years later, and I am doing less and less for the land. But completing my degree is something, if I stop thinking of myself shards of pottery. I simply am not broken or I am done being fixed. The world is larger than me. The world craves justice and liberty. The environment needs respect and attention. I am needed. The mountains from Costa Rica to Appalachia need a voice; they need someone who will sacrifice a lot for them. They need a person devoted and committed to their preservation. Just as I have healed my mental illness as well as I can, the environment needs a steward, a patron who will fight for the beauty in it.

Just as surviving trauma takes time to heal, the very act of healing has an undefined ending. I thought I was finished with healing when I realized the power I have in me, when I realized just how much I am capable of achieving. Deciding I could do things and writing down that I was capable just wasn’t enough. In the past I have written a lot about my life with bipolar disorder and a recognized disability. I think I am in a large category of people who do not know when we really are better. Last semester my therapist and psychologist agreed that I was over identifying with the manic depressive diagnosis. They were entirely right. The tricky ground on which I walk is that it is possible to achieve and live a healthy life with this disorder. I have written so much about hard things that it is hard to see just how successful I am today and now, how my hard work is paying off, how these capabilities I see in myself, are becoming healthy aspects of my life. I was sick. I wore the bandage much too long. Now, airing it out, the point is not whether or not there is a scar. The message is I need to move on, to find other things that make up my identity.

I had a little red Honda Accord for 10 years. The last time I looked at the mile gauge it had accumulated 311,111 thousand miles. Today I sold it. Sadly I can’t find a picture of the old car. I had named it Independence. Cleaning it out was really emotional.

When I got home from selling her, I quickly rearranged stuff in my bag and walked to school. Walking to school this morning took almost an hour. I can get to campus by foot in 40 minutes but my first class is all the way across campus.
I have a pedometer, and a plan to hitch a ride with a friend who lives near me and drives to school regularly. There are plenty more ways to get around without driving. In the long run it is way healthier for me and the environment as well as my financial situation. I got a ride home today and my pedometer still says 14,226 steps for today. I am happy to be healthy enough to be a pedestrian.

Optimism is a worthy way of life.

Evan’s Tire and Auto Repair is the kind of place you walk into and end up petting a docile pit bull one minute, turning to puzzle over a hornet’s nest decoration the next, and hand over the title to the car you’ve had for 10 years the next moment. Eddie is the man standing in front of me winking and handing me two hundred dollars, a quotient of money without wheels.

“I still have to clean it out.” I tell Eddie, as if he hasn’t noticed the rotting bananas and the layers of grime pressed into the floorboard.

I am now in Evan’s garage, through a door I always thought was just for employees. There is Independence with her hood open, alone in the middle of the operation as if she’s being prepared for surgery. Nothing in her is worth that much, but still I am this materialist scavenger, robbing her grave. I am afraid of my situation, feeling the vulnerability of the moment, shivering in a warm place.

I need to feel the grief of this moment. But for Eddie and Russ and for me (”I have to clean it out.”) time is money. I am a student with a 10:30 class and no room for mood changes or heavy emotions to weigh me down. I need to make myself as light as possible because it is 9 in the morning and today I am walking to class.

The significance, therefore, is not in the list of necessary items I take with me, but the sea shells and trinkets and thick layer of dirt and epidermis I leave behind. I have no regrets regarding the two pints of oil that I leave in her front seat, even the snazzy CD player. The physical matter at hand is nothing compared to the memories I’ve had with her. On her dashboard, I leave a small collection of mussels from the Clinch River and a variety of trinkets that I actually forget because of the march of time.

I drove Independence 200,000 miles of the 300,000 she accrued. According to an my Internet search, the accumulation of miles I drove her is about as far as the circumference of the Earth.

Now, I am walking the three to four miles between here and my college. My relationship with Independence was always bittersweet. There were the wrecks and speeding tickets that marked my first few years with her. I have moments, driving songs, and company (human and canine passengers) imprinted in my mind of our journeys. So when I pass certain places I think of the Women’s Tribute to Greg Brown or the songs my friends and I sang as we rolled along. Every second now, as I walk past the cows and cars on my way to class, I think of the opportunity that life has opened for me. I need to keep feeling the real sad loss of knowing she might be crushed if Eddie cannot fix her. But selling her brought me something much larger than two paper bills that will be gone in a couple trips to the grocery store.

For every mile I had driven, I could have been walking, riding a bike, or catching a ride with the multitude of friends who are now rising to the occasion of helping me. I am discovering the legacy of “Independence” has not been left behind, resold, or recycled into scrap metal. The namesake and legacy of my first and only car is becoming increasingly a part of my own two legs, my feet, my heels, and my soles and all.

I am working on writing a Timeline of Friendships that explains me. This is the first post in my "Midnight Snack" series. It focuses on Junior High and the amazing and under-appreciated people group known by most as children or tweens.

Timeline of Friendships
September 1994 First days in Vance Junior High School
October 1994 Becoming acquainted with my third team of Odyssey of the Mind
December 1994 First (Anonymous A)non-family-approved “best friend” ties my shoe laces together while Mrs. Green shows our class “A Christmas Carol” film
February 1995 Friend Anonymous A begins her downward spiral of self medicating by feeding her Alcoholism. After a bad time hanging out with her while she liberally samples the alcohol cabinet of the child she babysits. Later I walk to the mayor’s Mardi Gras party, with a breath mint to mask the taste of my own sampling endeavors. Distinct memory of sitting on a porch swing with a little girl named Maya, watching her eat jambalaya, and and beginning my first promise to myself.
I cannot let myself be like my best friend. I have to keep the child in me, like Maya.
November 1995 I become a vegetarian on Thanksgiving day. Children can be saints. I am barely 13. My best friend is self mutilating in ways I know and in other ways I will never be aware of.

I will never, NEVER, hurt myself. I will never drink alcohol again. I will never eat meat. I will never smoke cigarettes or do illegal drugs.

August 1996 Anonymous A prevails in encouraging me to sneak out of the house in the night, to attend a party with stoned older teenagers. Demand Anonymous A not drink that beer and that we leave right now or “I am done with her.” Somehow I prevail, but ultimately the law prevails. My saintliness is not rewarded when the police startle us back at my parent’s house.

August 1996 Later in the month, we are interrogated by some sort of juvenile legal counsel person.

September 1996 Anonymous A goes to rehab. I put my foot down somehow and step back from our friendship.

September 1996 First days at Tennessee High School

"I wandered into activism against Mountaintop Removal with the same lack of self purification and clarity that I scorn today."

Show me what walking for fitness looks like! This is what walking for fitness looks like!

Show me what white plastic red-bud blooms look like! This is what white plastic red-bud blooms look like.

Show me what Libby's house looks like! This is what Libby's house looks like.

Show me what Kentucky coffee beans look like! This is what Kentucky coffee beans look like!

Query -- what is your rendition of a radical Quaker?
Emotive, emotional, emo, exercising the known Quaker spices, calm? Radically quiet, Quaking, Queer, Questioning in every point of your life? Spiritual sacred that of God in everyone, Sexual, Sensitive, Seasoned Soup? More than one thing, All things? A “come as you are” Meeting, Joint Joining, Open?
What is MY rendition of radical Quakerism?
Quakers need people that are aware of internal points of tension in a Meeting. And we need people to emote about polarizing, tense issues.
I am a shaking Quaker. My personality hungers for tension. Tension is like a meaty question. Tension owns an uncomfortable silence.

Hi, I am Maggie. Get to know that side of me. I am volatile, vulnerable, yet valid.
Most Friends will agree humans are parcels of nature. What about the tremblers, the Quakers, like me? Are there two breeds of Meeting folks running around? Friends who breathe in steady, calm gusts of air, and a contrasting division of Quakers who feel the wind, so wild and vibrating. AND DON’T WE NEED BOTH? Both exist within all of us. Deep in the thicket of mockingbirds, one bird mimics a car alarm, harsh but real.
Such a big part of nature is it's fury.

I am inviting friends to Occupy Backyard at my house tonight. I hope this grows like crazy.

love, Maggie

Pictures will come. Even if just of trees.

"well, I've kinda dried up my bubbling brook..." Me on the phone with Karen.

Spring 2012 Reflection on: July 10, 2006 Earth First! Rendezvous Action

I had read of Earth First! in a book my spiritual sister had given me in yet another rough patch of high school. I had waited to read the novel, The Legacy of Luna by Julia Butterfly Child until after graduation. It was about a young woman who climbed a Redwood tree to protect the forest in an act of Civil Disobedience.
The newspaper article was like a wish come true. A herd of younger activists had fallen at my doorsteps. Fifty young adults committed civil disobedience, occupying Carbo, a power plant less than 40 miles away, that supposedly “kept the lights on” even for me.
When I was called by a family friend, I was excited and honored. Steve Brooks said they were interested in meeting me, these people who put their bodies on the line for nature.
The Bristol Herald Courier made sure to paint a polarizing/tabloid-esque picture of the “radical activists,” extremists,” and “eco-terrorists.” I cannot deny that I thrive on conflict. Everybody isn’t an activist, I concede. Maybe that’s the problem.
• People with names like Lyric and Storms.
• A woman with a pit bull named Burtha. • A memory of three young women of the 1970’s on the cover of Steve Fisher’s book. Maxine Kenney and two others sitting in the scoop of a bulldozer.
• My time in the light. Steve Brooks’ call is a calling, a summoning in grand.
• Other than “eco-terrorist” these terms come to take a hold in a serious part of my identity. • I take off my shoes. I want to feel my radical roots.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!?!

Here we are reflecting.

Time for Peace and Justice.

One of the movement's last to budge.

In Memory of Margaret Hope Bacon April 7, 1921 to February 24, 2011 Rest in Peace

Maggie Hess ENG 382N February 25, 2012 Thoughts Evolving on Silas House’s Play Before I read “This is my Heart for you” I was a bit regretful that we have to read a play instead of just nonfiction. After all, when I wrote poetry, which IS nonfiction, I was told that is not the subject matter of our class. I should learn to overcome such grudges. After reading the play but before attending it, I wrote this: Silas interwove the metaphor of nature (from as early as the Tennessee Williams quote) with the human nature. He presented a clear argument against homophobic actions and made a clear case for men and women loving whomever they pleased. I still am not clear on why reading this play is supposed to help the creative nonfiction writing process. Then on the class day of discussing the play, my fickle mind changed again. I understood our reason for reading it in a class on Nonfiction because the play walks the tender line that is walked when art reports on an issue of real tragedy.
On Friday I attended the play in a volatile state myself. My mood had dropped with the temperature like a snap. At the play, my mind was a slow acting sponge and my heart was pensive and uptight. I feel the moods of things. Friday night, the mood in the theatre was a mixture of things, but I felt so tense from when I walked in and up to the scene of the beating. In the text of the play, Silas House mentioned that the cast in the background sit tight and stiff in the beginning and I think I absorbed their emotional tension. Aaaaaaaaaaaa! I am not being clear. Ideologically, I am open-minded and support fairness, rights for all couples to love whomever they want. I want societal change, which almost always takes people being pushed to the extreme before they change. I am in favor of GLBTQ relationships. But I don’t want people to nearly get beat to death as part of the process. I don’t know why. I really am clueless about why I am so weak on this subject. I would commit civil disobedience for a number of issues. I am trying to wrap my mind around my bashfulness on this issue.
Maybe this is not what you asked for me to write about. But I think that the EMOTION was the element that was occurring in the physical production much more than in my imagination of what the play would be like when I read the script. Thoughts and feeling are things we evolve through. I guess the written play was more thoughty and the living play was more feelingish. Right now, having went to Quaker Meeting, I am feeling the impact of the daughter of the Oberst couple who went to the play and spoke extensively about how influenced her.
I am seeing in myself a hypocrisy that bothers me deeply. I have only attended two gay rights events in my life. Other than those, which made me feel uncomfortable, I have stayed away. I hear people say that holding signs and being public about their political beliefs can be extremely uncomfortable in general. I am aware that nothing is JUST political. In fact political issues generally are being talked about because people are deeply touched by them. Wars kill people and wars give people jobs; MTR causes cancer and ugliness and MTR gives neighbors reasons to turn on each other. I have been an activist in so many areas. But I stay publically quiet about sexuality to a large degree.
On the set of This is My Heart for You, there were these clear heart shaped plastic leaves of plants, props integral to the narrative of the play. Some people stepped on them coming in. They were crushed, making horrible sounds. Seemed pretty to me symbolic. But I think that’s a poem.

Maggie Hess February 23, 2012 PSJ 205 Milking a Wise Yack: Maggie Hess Interviews Eric Blevins I read of Earth First! in a book my spiritual sister had given me in yet another rough patch of high school. I had waited to read the novel, The Legacy of Luna by Julia Butterfly Child until after graduation. It was about a young woman who climbed a Redwood tree to protect the forest in an act of Civil Disobedience. I loved Julia Butterfly Child as I respected the great authors whose works lined the bookshelf walls of my parents’ house. At that point of my life, I was unaware that activists of this kind might make their way into my life.
On July 10, 2006, the newspaper article was like a wish come true. A herd of younger activists had fallen at my doorsteps. Fifty young adults committed civil disobedience, occupying Carbo, a power plant less than 40 miles away, that supposedly “kept the lights on” even for me. When I was called by a family friend, I was excited and honored. Steve Brooks said they were interested in meeting me, these people who put their bodies on the line for nature.
The Bristol Herald Courier made sure to paint a polarizing/tabloid-esque picture of the “radical activists,” extremists,” and “eco-terrorists.” I cannot deny that I thrive on conflict. Everybody isn’t an activist, I concede. Maybe that’s the problem.
• People with names like Lyric and Storm.
• A woman with a pit bull named Burtha. • A memory of three young women of the 1970’s on the cover of Steve Fisher’s book. Maxine Kenney and two others sitting in the scoop of a bulldozer.
• My time in the light. Steve Brooks’ call is a calling, a summoning in grand.
• Other than “eco-terrorist” these terms come to take a hold in a serious part of my identity.

• I take off my shoes. I want to feel my radical roots.

I interviewed Eric Blevins primarily because I think he has found a way to pursue activism over a long period of time without becoming too drained emotionally and secondarily because he is a long time friend. So I asked my friend if he felt he had found a way to sustainable activism. Over the course of his seven or eight year stint at activism, he says he has “been doing it without draining (himself) too much.” Eric continued to tell me his tricks to the trade. These include “doing things that are renewing to my soul such as yoga, playing with friends, and going in the woods.” He also said he is aware that if he is unable to work on a specific project, things are still going to get done. This was especially good for me to hear because I have often felt guilty when I stepped back in my own activism. I wondered if his place of residence, outside the coal fields, but close enough to see the beauty of Appalachia, is related to his sustenance. According to Eric, his home is related to his sustenance, but there are forms of oppression near where he lives. Eric’s activism began when he was a student at Middle Tennessee State University and took a trip to West Virginia to see what was happening there. On that trip, he both was able to hear people who were impacted by it and see a mine site. In the same general time, he went to a Mountain Justice summer camp that encouraged him. He said that “seeing all those young activists, (he) really felt called to work with this issue.
Eric is a terrifically tall, mountain of a man, with hair to make Rapunzel jealous, and a presence that expects respect among his peer groups of anti-Mountaintop Removal activists. His sense of humor is a bit sarcastic and confusing but it is funny, nonetheless. Until this interview, I always had thought he tended on the pessimistic side of the hopefulness continuum. After all, he always liked Derek Jensen, an author and film maker who (in my opinion) seems to think the end of humanity was just around the corner. But when I asked Eric his educated guess and forcast for the future of MTR, his words inspired me. “No one really knows what’s going to happen.” He began. “MTR has been slowing down a lot because of a lot of actions that have been happening.” The advice he suggested for a young activist included “enjoy yourself when you are doing activism and do things that are fun and change in a positive way, and always push for fundamental, radical change.” I loved his finishing words to that question: “Because we need to change a lot.”
Eric is one of my activist friends who has put his body on the line in civil disobedience. Though he crossed the line at a couple actions at mine sites and a “die in” in Knoxville, he only experienced serious physical risk once. In the fall of 2009 he partook in a tree sit on a platform in a Mountaintop Removal site in West Virginia. I wondered how he felt during this action. “It was scary but also empowering. More empowering than scary.” On my end of the phone, it felt good to hear him say that. He continued to tell me some things he has learned as an activist. “The established institutions of our society are very resistant to positive change and try to maintain their power with violence. And sometimes it can seem the changes we work for aren’t having an impact. But they are impacting the environment we are trying to protect.” His words were both sincere and powerful and listening to Eric speak it occurred to me I have a serious wealth of wisdom in all my friends.
------------------------------------------------------------- These following italicized words are not my own… Eric sent me them from the reflection he wrote about his tree sit.
“We sat in trees at the edge of a mine site for 9 days in the middle of the Appalachian winter in West Virginia on Coal River Mountain… We stopped blasting for 9 days within sight of the Brushy Fork toxic coal waste impoundment that holds over 7 billion gallons of black sludge above the Coal River Valley. Massey Coal says that if the impoundment's dam fails it will kill approximately 998 people in that valley, and Massey impoundments have failed in the past… Then I climbed a beautiful tall oak tree with stirrups made of climbing rope attached to a climbing harness I was wearing, which I kept on for 9 days straight. I had to break a few branches off the tree on the way up, and I kissed that tree several times during the whole set up process… When I came down I was very dizzy and disoriented while first walking on solid ground for the first time in over a week. We spent three days in jail before getting bailed out. As much as jail sucks, it can be a very empowering experience. All the prisoners I talked to about what I did were very supportive, though some probably thought I was crazy. They don't like seeing the land destroyed either. One of them was very knowledgeable about wildlife and hates seeing beautiful habitat destroyed.” --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Al Gore once said that Climate Activists (like Eric Blevins) are the heroes of this time. I know Eric as a friend and an activist hero. We joke and play and we support each other now and then when I need a shoulder to cry on or when he needs to climb a tree for justice. When I am afraid to cross the line, I take Eric’s advice knowing there will be someone else willing to cross the line for the cause of Mountaintop Removal, saving the world, and such.
I knew I was important my whole life. But as a kid I never fathomed I would have friends as brave and dignified as Eric. Sometimes I feel the corporate control of the world has its’ strangle hold on my emotions. But more often now, I think of people whom I know, and I grip onto my own power. This is why I chose Eric to write about. He encourages me to self empowerment – people like him are the hope for the world.

Is it in the inherent nature of librarians
to clutter the silence with gossip?

I stand by the curb waiting for my ride --
Chickadee bobs up, nearly smacks into my face.
Spring is here.

For example:
I always thought cats were docile animals, like women.
But this morning,
I witness the cat I always see chasing squirrels,
that feline finally catches a squirrel.
Pins it down and tries to break its neck
until the squirrel
somehow shimmies out of her clutches,
to scurry up a tree.

Everything on my walk home
is magnified in beauty.
I am drawn over to a fence
by a sign that says
"Organic Farm -
Don't spray."
Some energy jumps
into my skin.

Kicking off my sandals,
with a skip in my step,
I feel the different textures
in the grass.

Past the high school
and the middle school.
Past the elementary school
and into a house in the suburbs.

This book I am living is novel.
The poem I am writing is ready for a bit of anarchy.

I am like the
flock of sparrows
twisting and turning with their
collective conscience.

I am like the
mockingbird perched alone
jesting like a bard,
"we, we, we!"

Survived tornado, last midterm ever, leap year.