I read on Facebook an article someone posted about The Mount of Olives Cemetery being desecrated in Jerusalem. Then I read the vitriolic comments against any and every Muslim everywhere in the world. Both the content of the article, and the comments were profoundly distressing, because it seems we keep going around and around and around, mired in both ancient and recent hatreds. I had the usual barrage of emotions and lamentations, ‘When will this end?’, ‘Never. It’s been going on for thousands of years. It’ll never change.’, ‘Why can’t we get along with our neighbors?’ Nothing of what I was thinking hadn’t been thought a million times before by millions of people.

My next thought may not have been original but it was sobering. I remembered this: “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”–Carl Sagan

As it has in the past, this commencement address made me cry, in a way that news articles usually don’t, however disturbing. When I finished sniffling into my box of tissues, I realized that the reason it always makes me cry is because for me, it contains what Ray Bradbury referred to in Something Wicked This Way Comes as ‘the sound truth makes being said’.

I have struggled with the concept of organized religion my whole life, at once fascinated and resistant, despite my upbringing as an Ashenazic Jew. What I found in my exposure to religion was not God, but the many faces of humanity: our need for ritual, our inventiveness, our impressive capacity for resilience and hope, compassion and empathy, and also our nearly unimaginable capacity for cruelty and malice. The anthropological world has analyzed myths and argued about the faces of the gods and demons being the faces of man, in every possible incarnation. I agree. But like other humans, I need more than that conclusion.  I guess that when I read stories, I’m searching for our creation of God, for something that will show me the better side of our natures. Most of the stories I write have an overriding theme in which monsters evolve into something better than they were when they started. Not all of them. Some of them cater to my love of horror, the monsters in my own closet. But my favorite stories to read and write are about redemption and evolution, not in the eyes of an anthropomorphic or even nebulous god of organized religion, but toward our own survival as a species, as Carl Sagan specified, the individual adoption of compassion and empathy that will ultimately allow us to continue on the pale blue dot. It is the evidence of individual evolution in the faces of my fellow creatures, whether that evolution is physical, psychological, or emotional, that shows me more than any book or doctrine could, the evidence of a great and ordered, or even a divine force.

I recently saw a very cool version of the Ramayana–the story of Rama and Sita in Hindu myth. It was called Sita Sings the Blues, by an artist called Nina Paley. It’s a short animated movie, and it is interspersed with the events, one must assume, of the artist’s own life when she was dumped by her boyfriend. And she cleverly weaves them in with the unfortunate journey of Sita, Rama’s wife, identifying obviously with Sita.

So here is the gist of the story, which stayed with me long into the night after I saw it:

Rama is a beloved son of the King of Ayodhya, one of the many kingdoms on the Indian Peninsula long ago. One of the king’s wives hates Rama and Sita and forces the king to banish his son on the night he was supposed to be crowning him king, for 14 years. Rama, the dutiful son, says nothing in complaint, only accedes to his father’s wishes, and goes into the dark demon-infested forest. With him goes his faithful wife Sita, one of the most beautiful women in India, who is believed to be the incarnation of Lakshmi, another goddess, as Rama is supposed to be the incarnation of Vishnu. Into the forest they go. And Rama gains the reputation as a fierce demon-killer.

While they sojourn in the forst, a rival king, Ravana, spies Sita and decides he must have her as his wife. He is part demon himself and gifted by Brahma with extreme intelligence and many other gifts, some of which, according to the story include many arms and heads, like they do in myths. Rama goes to chase a beautiful deer that is set free in the forest by Ravana to distract Rama, and while he is gone, the demons kidnap Sita and bring her to Ravana’s palace. Rama is away from her for months. But Sita refuses Ravana for all this time to uphold her virtue and love for Rama who she knows will come and rescue her. When Rama finally comes and defeats the rival king with his army of monkey deities, he doubts her virtue in remaining chaste from Ravana, and forces her to go through a trial by fire to prove her purity before he will take her back.

She survives the test unharmed. He takes her back, and is then accepted into the palace, his banishment over. Shortly afterwards, Sita announces to Rama that she is pregnant with their child. But his subjects talk about Sita and how Rama took back a woman who had slept in the home of another man. So Rama, swayed by the local gossip, banishes Sita and has her dumped far away where no one will see her. Apparently, he never saw any after-school specials about peer pressure. Poor Sita gives birth in the woods to twins of Rama. They grow up in the woods, and still she is faithful to him and allows her sons to be taught songs in tribute to Rama’s greatness, by a sage she encounters in the woods.

One day Rama comes upon his sons singing in the woods and sees Sita. He agrees to take her back if she undergoes another trial to test her purity. How magnanimous of him. She says instead, “If I have always been faithful to you, let the earth mother take me back into her arms.” The earth mother arises and carries Sita away with her. And Rama is somehow astonished. Sita was held to be the icon of the perfect wife, and Rama as the icon of the perfect man.

After seeing this story, I was reminded of another tale of staggering cruelty and abuse that ended…rather differently.  It was the tale of Emain Macha, from the Irish Gaelic Celts of the Iron Age around 1000-500 BC. Macha was a woman of the Sidhe or the Tuatha de Danaan,  suspected to be older Bronze Age inhabitants of Eire.

She was married to the king of Ulster. He boasted about what a cool chick he had married to all of his friends and neighbors. He boasted so much, that one day, well into his cups of mead, he boasted that she could run so fast, she could outrun the deer and the other chieftain’s horses. Of course, being a bunch of drunk jocks by this time, they demanded that he put his money where his mouth was, and test her. Of course, he was king and so he ordered her to run, to save him from humiliation.

She was pregnant with his child at the time, nine months pregnant. Running was the last thing she wanted to do, and she begged him to reconsider. I’m not sure, being the magical creature she was, why she didn’t just flip him off right then and there, but she, like many women with assholitis, obliged him when he continued to demand that she run. So she ran. And what a surprise when she fell and went into labor.

As she screamed in agony, she cursed all the men of Ulster to fall down with labor pains for nine days, beginning in the hour of their greatest need for warriors to defend the kingdom, down to the ninth generation of men. And then she took the children and vanished into the forest.

This myth sets the stage for the later Red Branch cycle in which the Hound of Ulster, Cuchulain was forced to defend the Ford of the Pass against the army of Ireland by himself as the men of Ulster lay ill with the curse. He was half Sidhe and so free of the curse. The message of the cautionary tale, if it wasn’t obvious, was this: Never piss off a fairy woman, or you will pay and pay and pay. There are consequences for acting like a misogynistic jerk.

Knowing both of these stories, one might be led to compare the difference in the reactions of the women to their situations, and to read into the stories the differences in the political climate of their times, of their differences in culture, in the status and power of women, or at least male attitudes, which allowed these stories to surface and be interpreted as they were. And certainly one could make suppositions about the ideas of the authors, whoever they may have been. 

But no. My position is not to be an objective social scientist.  I had far more fun as I lay awake thinking about Rama and Sita, and imagined with glee the end of the Ramayana if Sita were to be replaced by Macha, and Rama fully realized the consequences of his appalling behavior.

The world that is emerging around me as I read the news and tackle increasingly challenging socioeconomic and political barriers is far from, and will never be again the world I grew up with or expected.  I grew up in a middle-class Jewish immigrant/refugee family that began emerging from poverty and European anti-Semitism when they moved here. One of my great-grandmothers ‘stole the border’ of Russia underneath a hay cart with her three children, and two child cousins, to escape the pogroms during the reign of the Czar. She was 16, and she had been rolled in the snow by soldiers when she was pregnant. Another great-grandmother, for whom my daughter Rosa is named, convinced her husband to ‘visit’ America for a couple weeks. When he was on the boat, she sold their house and possessions and bought tickets for her and her five children, and followed him. She was pregnant with their sixth child. She showed up in America, pregnant and homeless with her flummoxed husband. Shortly afterwards, Hitler came to power, and eventually, their country became an Axis power.

This is the backdrop against which I learned about America and about the world. I was shown photos of the Holocaust and the Six Day War in dayschool when I was seven years old, and almost every year after. And the message was clear about people losing power and taking it back. But for my generation, having grown up far from death camps and pogroms and viewing these terrible images from a comfortable assembly room while eating hummus and falafel, hope was not something new, and horror at what governments and corrupt people could do was far far away. Hope and optimism were part of who we were. We were the sum of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents hopes.

What I face now as I try to explain to my daughter why people are blowing themselves and others up in a culture that is so similar to ours (Jewish), as I try to explain why we can’t voice anger about the government that we were free to voice a decade ago, as I try to explain to her how and why people are on the street with signs saying “Please help me” while everywhere around are displays of unimaginable wealth and power, I find that I cannot explain it to myself, let alone to a five year old. Her simple and elegant answer is “Well we should change that.” And my response is always, “It’s more complicated than that.” And then I run right into the seemingly immutable truth that we have lost the power we once believed we had, to change things. A slogan for hope and change on a bumper sticker that goes by as we have this conversation in the car, is not enough to keep people like me from drinking ourselves to death or becoming numb in frustration.

And then I remember the power of stories. I took a class in college called Media in Anthropology. It began with the folk tales everyone knows, and went through radio, television, and the internet. And its topic was not just the power of information, but the power of information told through imagination, stories of cultures and generations. The ability of the simple story to change a thought here and there, and through those changed thoughts, even subconscious, came changes in the thoughts of whole generations,  paradigm shifts.

An essayist from the LA Weekly many years ago named Michael Ventura, who was like last generation’s answer to Lewis Black, once said “serious people exhaust themselves in a sideline of commentary on how everything is not alright, not alright at all, and it gets sucked up into today’s media and spit back out in a format that says, ‘It’s alright.’ As the world news has gotten more disturbing, the trend in broadcast journalism has been to get more and more flim-flam, with the one message, ‘It’s all right,’ running right alongside the other message ‘We are being killed, we are killing, we are dying.’ You may measure how much our people know everything is ’not alright’ by how much they need to be ceaselessly told that it is. Millions of dollars were paid to a broadcaster with a calm authoritative air who just by his very presence assured people that ‘No matter what I’m telling you, everything is still alright.’ to resolve the schism between the media and its message.”

The beauty of stories is that they are sneaky. People and their thoughts and feelings and fears and hopes come out in their stories. However fantastic, they often contain a grain of truth. But they are removed in time and place, into a magical world that could be anywhere and happen to anyone. The stories that changed things sometimes didn’t even have to be ‘good’ or skillful or come from someone with money and power. They just had to be told.

I do not know where we are going in our culture, in our political climate, in our country as a people collectively called ‘Americans’, or what my life or my daughter’s life will look like when we get there. But while I rail against my own powerlessness at the polls, or as I pass homeless people who used to be doctors or social workers or teachers, I wonder if the ability to tell a story is the ability to retain hope, and the ability to change things under the noses of people who would keep them the same. In what feels daily like being tossed in a sea of my own insignificance, telling stories feels like the only way to share my thoughts and experiences, the only way to feel heard by someone somewhere, before I’m lost in the sea again.

I work in emergency preparedness. I spend my career preparing for the worst that could happen, and helping communities prepare. I have a smart wonderful precocious child and a husband who is a medical resident. In this context, I get to a point where life becomes about lists of things that need to get done: at work, in this or that community, at home. And experience becomes a series of crossing things off that list, or working to cross things off.

This is an untenable position for human beings to maintain for very long without breaking down or ending up on a bell tower, or simply dying as a very crotchety old person with a lifetime of regrets. Here in America, we maintain this pace because our culture has convinced us that this is ‘productive’ and hence, this is our definition of ‘success’. There is little place for imagination in all this, and certainly little time, unless there is the prospect for making money.

I was going at this breakneck pace and slowly turning into a mess, when I began having very strange dreams. My husband is Native American. He and his family believe in spirit helpers. My daughter sees ghosts or at least beings that are not visible to me. I truly believe she sees them because her details are too accurate to be pretend.  I see nothing. I am as psychically dead as a corpse, with a few exceptions.

So when I start having weird dreams, it gets my attention. One dream I had was crystal clear about its message. I will never forget that message, “You’re not listening,” they said to me. And I wasn’t. I wasn’t sleeping or eating, I was worrying all the time about everything, and I certainly wasn’t enjoying life. A day later, my daughter begged for a scary story having exhausted all the scary children’s books in the house and at the book store. So I made one up. It felt good. It felt so good, in fact, that I wrote down the story, and added to it. I felt better than I had in months. I wrote more. And I noticed something, that the more I wrote, the better and less desperate I felt.

I still feel ragged sometimes, and neurotic often. But something about the act of writing/storytelling, the use of imagination fulfills something irreplaceable and completes me as a human. It makes me listen and it makes me tell. It makes me share and interact with the world that I was speeding through without seeing or feeling.

I’ve been published a couple times, and hope someday to be good enough to get paid, because that seems to be the gold standard by which we measure our proficiency for writing. And I want to be published because stories need to be read and imagination shared. But I write to be whole.