Connecting the past with the present

I had underlined these sentences in Robert Graves’ introduction to The Greek Myths, when I was a freshman at Columbia College in 1964-65. Graves’ book was a secondary resource for making sense of ancient stories studied in the Humanities course that was required to be taken by every College student. I’m not sure Graves’ narrative has stood the test of time among anthropologists, even mythologists–it may be, in itself, myth not science. But for an eighteen year old (boy) from a small town in mid-America, this speculation certainly opened my mind to wondering about gender and culture in a way I never imagined. Here I am today wondering whether or not an epochal transformation is once again going to happen in the cultural/social relations of the sexes. Fortunately for me, too, I had enjoyed a wondrous summer of sexual play with the first woman I ever loved before I encountered university studies about the matter. I recalled, when I read these sentences, the power of the female over me, the male.

“Ancient Europe had no gods. The Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless and omnipotent; and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought. She took lovers, but for pleasure, not to provide her children with a father. Men feared, adored and obeyed the matriarch: the hearth which she tended in a cave or hut being their earliest social centre, and motherhood their prime mystery…. There is however, no evidence that, even when women were sovereign in religious matters, men were denied fields in which they might act without female supervision, though it may well be thought that they adopted many of the ‘weaker-sex’ characteristics hitherto thought to be entrusted to man. They could be trusted to hunt, fish, gather certain foods, mind flocks and herds, and help defend the tribal territory against intruders, so long as they did not transgress matriarchal law.”

My intention is to live the remainder of my life as a loving man who wants nothing more than to witness the world become more sustainable and justly inclusive because wonderful, powerful, and loving women lead in transforming it.

a memory of the day Martin Luther King died

I left Columbia’s campus headed for PS126 in East Harlem worried about the safety of my new wife who was teaching there. On the news of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, a car drove by the school and shot out some of the street-facing windows of the school building. It was inexplicable that a car full of enraged African-Americans would endanger children who were themselves mostly African-American. But that was the kind of distressing day and then period of time it was. When I arrived at the school and identified myself to the police who guarded its entrance, they let my wife exit the building, and after embracing, we made our way quickly north to 158th Street to the apartment where we lived as our first home together. We cried with friends much of that week because Martin Luther King, our generation’s spokesman of hope for a better country, was gone. Our naive idealism ended but we took more seriously Gandhi’s truth that we ourselves were the change that we wanted to see. We came of age on the day MLK died. He instilled us with a hope which could not be killed despite a world darkened by his death. That hope led us to continue to be engaged actively in community projects for social change.

Monday’s a day to celebrate Martin Luther King. He is the best example I know of how to be an American.

(See a friend Mike’s tribute to MLK here.)