Pulled into Nazareth

This year I’m working on a book entitled Pulled into Nazareth, from the first line of “The Weight,” a song generally attributed to Robbie Robertson of The Band. It was first recorded in 1968 on the album Music from Big Pink, one of the albums I listened to obsessively. Full of allusion and cryptic references, the enigmatic lyrics leave themselves open to many interpretations. For me, without putting too fine a point on it, they suggest the stumbling process of individuation, which for myself and some of my siblings, took up the years of the 1970’s.

This great version features the Staples Singers. It isn’t really a matter of the lyrics alone. The music is very exciting and the combination of the lyric suggestions and the music’s blues and wailing against the drums adds up to an emotional experience which might mean something to whatever place you currently find yourself. And that, is what the Seventies were about: finding yourself somewhere you didn’t expect but which is surely (is it not?) helping you along your very own path.

Pulled into Nazareth, was feelin' about half past dead

I just need some place where I can lay my head

“Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?’

He just grinned and shook my hand, "no" was all he said.

Nazareth was at least partly the location of a legendary guitar maker in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, but also the home of a wandering carpenter.

Take a load off, Fanny

Take a load for free

Take a load off, Fanny

And you put the load right on me.

According to Robbie Robertson: “For me it was a combination of Catholicism and gospel music. The story told in the song is about the guilt of relationships, not being able to give what’s being asked of you. Someone is stumbling through life, going from one situation to another, with different characters. In going through these catacombs of experience. you’re trying to do what’s right, but it seems that with all the places you have to go, it’s just not possible. In the song, all this is ‘the load.’”

Titles for books are really interesting. I tried other ones, but kept coming back to this. The song is so well known and has been covered by so many people it can’t help but be recognized. In this book, Line, Marty and Paul have all left home. They all stumble, but their experiences take them deeper into the lives they have been given to lead.

Paul goes to Alaska, determined to find himself in a place none of his family has been. Alaska is the North Country and no mistake. So much is happening there in the Seventies. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 is, at the time, “widely described as the most openhanded and enlightened piece of legislation that has ever dealt with aboriginal people” [John McPhee, Coming into the Country, 1977]. An oil boom brings people to work on a pipeline laid from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez in the south, a technological feat. And midway in the decade, high schools begin to be built in the villages which had previously sent their high school age kids off to board under difficult conditions.

After a few dicey adventures, Line’s husband attracts her to Santa Cruz, where he is studying for his doctorate and later teaches in the History of Consciousness department at the newly-formed university. During this time, Allan Chadwick introduces French intensive gardening and is called the “Pied Piper” of the organic gardening movement in California. Line spends much time in his garden established at the university. She has more kids of her own and becomes midwife to others.

Marty, doing administrative work in architecture firms, finds herself at the beginning of a tech revolution. She is introduced to databases and word processing and there are rumors that architects will soon begin doing computer-aided drafting. Meanwhile, her boyfriend Erik continues to dabble in drugs on the one hand and architecture on the other. None of this answers the urgent identity questions Marty continues to pursue on her own, but this cannot be helped.

I look forward to the year of research, discovery and writing!

Lightly Held Books

With the preparation of a manuscript, the design of a book cover and a couple of digital uploads, Don and I have become book publishers. Or at least I have. He still has way too much to do with his own film business, but given the turtle-ish speed of the book business, I think I can handle it.

We published a memoir scavenged from the weblog we published from 2002 to 2009 called Living in the Flatlands. We used Amazon’s CreateSpace and an imprint we set up which follows the Lightly Held theme we’ve used for filmmaking. We’ve ordered proof copies, which will arrive in about ten days, but, given Don’s amazing visual sense in designing the book cover, and a CreateSpace template, I expect the result to look like a real book! It’s kind of a trial run, but we didn’t want Flatlands to disappear. The blog came to a natural end upon Jesse growing up and going to college, and our family changing.

Living in the Flatlands will be available as a paperback and also in a Kindle version. I am coming around to self-publishing partly because I have grown to understand the economics of the publishing business. As someone said, “the pie is smaller now.” Any fool can publish, of course, and many do. Marketing and distribution are utterly foreign to me, but it is possible to get your work out and it will just have to take its chances. For Amazon, distribution is partly accomplished by keywords. “The world’s become a big database,” says Don.

I’m well aware of the controversies surrounding Amazon. It does take business from small, local bookstores. But independent bookstores which build on their strengths as community centers are thriving. From my work in the library, I know what best-seller-dom is like. Entertainment! For all those books that the few big publishers don’t want to take a chance on, small publishers step in. Most use print-on-demand technology such as CreateSpace! We certainly appreciated the freedom to put into our book what we wanted. Our ideas are subversive to the corporate culture we are using to get them out.

What this means for So Are You To My Thoughts is not quite certain. I’ve had some interest from agents. A typical response was, “while this sounds like a strong project, I'm afraid it doesn't strike me as a likely fit with me and my particular editorial contacts.” This year I will be working on Book 4 of the series, entitled Pulled Into Nazareth. After finishing it, I am thinking of taking off next year, 2015, to publish the first four books. I would love to have a dedicated editor for them, but it is a lot to ask when there is no financial incentive whatsoever.

As a younger person I longed for certain kinds of books that I usually couldn’t get my hands on. Now, when everything is available yet time is so short, getting people’s attention is difficult. However, I still believe that a book is a Trojan horse. Particularly in a conformist culture, which we are once again becoming. You can still take a book to bed with you and your friends will never know. The ideas in it may change your life.

Our Bodies, Our Lives

Of all the upheavals which happened in people’s personal values in the late 1960’s and 1970’s, none can really compare with the revolution in how we viewed our bodies. When I grew up, discussion of bodies was almost taboo. One’s attention was constantly directed inward, toward inner virtue as opposed to external beauty. We tried to look as nice as we could with our limited circumstances, and cleanliness was certainly next to godliness. But all of our family’s resources were directed toward education and inner value.

Only in the late 1960’s did people begin to take a finely-tuned look at the body instead of ignoring it. In my case, as for others, in The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing’s feminine honesty broke new ground. If she could discuss menstruation, the clitoris, writing the words down in a novel everyone was reading, perhaps we could discuss them with each other. Not that I did. The prohibitions for me were much too strong. But I began to think about myself physically in a different way.

I never owned a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, first published in 1970 by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective to give accurate health and medical information to a broad audience of women, but I think all my friends did. Wilhelm Reich’s phrase “the body is the unconscious” also contributed greatly to this new way of looking at oneself. For if this were true, people were whole, all of one piece. There was no separation between body and soul. The one reflected the other completely.

What followed was a wealth of new ways of thinking, spawning interest in many new and old fields. All of the hippie traveling we did helped, leading people to understand that what we were doing in the West was not the only way. The mind/body connection was explored in physical practices such as yoga, hard and soft martial arts, massage, quigong and meditation. Alternative healing, birthing and dying were all opened to examination and experiment. Food and diet were finally admitted into the health picture.

We had new attitudes about what was attractive, such as natural looking bodies, and people began to understand that emotional weather was part of one’s personal picture as well. People began to sort out what could be cured and what you must live with. Chemical imbalances could now be treated. Handicapped people were helped to achieve their goals. Sexual orientations of all kinds were tested. Everything could be talked about, and generally was!

Line, Marty and Paul live through this change. Each of them is reticent about their own physicality, but they begin to see its importance. Line becomes a nurse, working first in gynecological wards and then in oncology. She studies herbal remedies and practices such as Reiki, and is fully awake to the extraordinary journey people take from birth to death. She becomes a midwife in later years, sharing all that she has learned.

Marty, who has always thought of herself as unattractive, moves into a stronger relationship to her body as she studies tai chi and disciplines her voracious, intellectual mind. She takes photographs which show that consciousness is fully present in the body. Paul, who spends the 1970’s in Alaska, contributes as an educator with an open heart. He marries a French-Canadian woman who insists on treating her early cancer in her own way. Paul also has to deal with his own post-polio syndrome as he gets older.

All of this change was welcome. It complicates things to have so many choices, but also enhances one's ability to give of one's particular gifts. By this time we have come full circle and focus too much on surfaces. We need to get back to an understanding of how much inner values affect our external selves. But time and our ever-renewing culture will probably take care of that.

With One Hand Waving Free

Yesterday, before lunch, I finished a first draft of With One Hand Waving Free. Unlike last year when I celebrated the end of a draft of Fit Company for Oneself with a fire, a glass of wine and some chestnuts, this year I took a nap in the sun in the hammock! Yes, in October in San Rafael, California, the sun is strong in the middle of the day and, though it has moved far to the south, it falls full on the hammock that is the furniture of our front garden ‘room.’ Sweet sun lies upon me like a human hand, blessing me with its warmth.

The title of this book, from Dylan’s song “Mr. Tambourine Man,” is apt for Line, Marty and Paul. Each of them, in his own way, finds a “diamond sky” to dance beneath, intent on seizing the day and letting tomorrow take care of itself. Indeed it is inherent in their understanding that if you embrace the gifts and needs of the day, tomorrow will follow naturally, resulting in the life you are meant to live.

Line uproots herself from Chicago, taking her small son but leaving her husband who is embroiled in growing violence. She takes a train to San Francisco, where Marty is already living. Marty goes to California to live with a family she met in England, but then takes a clerical job which frees her to read and think as she likes. She falls for an enigmatic young architect whose absences and silences Line distrusts. Paul finishes college, at last brought face to face with the fact that he cannot become a Lutheran pastor as is expected. He takes a teaching job in Fairbanks, Alaska. The end of the book finds Sparky (Line) reunited with her gang in San Francisco when Paul stops briefly on his way.

So now that you know what happens, do you want to read the book? When I read fiction, I go straight to the end to get it over with. Then I am free of the plot and can read to find out what the writer thinks is important, and how the characters embody his or her values, or not. I am reading for values, plain and simple. Needless to say, many books do not stand up to this kind of reading! But that doesn’t stop me. I write for values too.

Robert Pirsig states in Lila: An Inquiry into Morals that the world is nothing but value, that value in fact drives evolution. He asks whether quality is to be found in the subject or the object, and when he realizes that it is in neither, he decides that it is independent of either and the source of both. He states that “without Dynamic Quality an organism cannot grow. But without static quality an organism cannot last. Dynamic liberals and radicals need conservatives to keep them from making a mess of the world through unneeded change. Conservatives also need liberals and radicals to keep them from making a mess of the world through unneeded stagnation [http://robertpirsig.org/MOQSummary.htm].”

This is a big topic to drop into a blog post crowing about finishing the draft of a novel! Nevertheless, in trying to place what my novels are doing in the world I think about it a lot! They are clearly not providing heroes and heroines fighting obvious good and evil. They do not sponsor the received ideas of any nation or creed. They are a sincere attempt to watch my characters muddling through experience based upon my own and that of my friends and relations. Line, Marty and Paul make mistakes, have successes and failures, which are often not understood until much later. In a complex world such as ours, growth is not always in one direction. People grow up, down, around and through.

And it is slow! With a great deal of luck, my characters will be in their fifties before I let go of them. Maybe even older. What does it mean to become whole? To become a real person? These questions open a look into the dynamic values in which I am interested and which I hope that Line, Marty and Paul’s lives embody over time.

Alternative Spirit

The list of people leading alternative spiritual practices in 1969 when I arrived in California is so long, I can’t do more than name them in a blog piece. But even to name them evokes the rich spirit of aspiration, exploration and controversy rife at that time at the edge of the continent, where, as my Dad said, “all the loose nuts and bolts in the country had rolled!”

Two Episcopalians probably opened Pandora’s Box. Bishop James Pike, who led Grace Cathedral at the top of Nob Hill only a few blocks from where I lived, had just died. But his charismatic personality and challenges to orthodox belief were legendary. He advocated the ordination of women, racial desegregation and the acceptance of lesbians and gays as leaders, things so common now we cannot imagine the heat they generated in his day.

Alan Watts was on the radio so often in the early 1970’s, I could hardly bear to listen. (I would be more receptive now!) He had been an Episcopal priest, but by this time was living on a houseboat in Sausalito and interpreting Eastern philosophy for the West both as a teacher in the American Academy of Asian Studies and a programmer for the radio station KPFA.

Murshid Samuel Lewis gave up his inheritance to embrace mystical and spiritual teachings, becoming a teacher in the Chisti Sufi order. Known in San Francisco as Sufi Sam, a voice told him, “I will make you spiritual leader of the hippies.” He developed the all-embracing dances which were the beginnings of the Dances of Universal Peace, now done all over the world.

Shunryu Suzuki

Shunryu Suzuki headed the burgeoning San Francisco Zen Center. His book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind was read by almost everyone. (Still is!) When he died in 1971, Zentatsu Richard Baker enlarged the focus and reach of the Zen Center, leading it to become an institution with monasteries at Tassajara, San Francisco and across the Bay in Muir Beach, as well as opening Green’s restaurant. The Zen Center became a huge educational, and even a political force during Jerry Brown’s governorship of California.

Though not associated with traditional spiritual groups, Esalen Institute, located near Carmel and in San Francisco, played a huge part in our cultural life. Studying consciousness using countless psychological and physical methods, the Institute fostered everything from meditation to organic food! Founded in 1962 by Michael Murphy and Dick Price, it is still going strong with public workshops exploring the sciences and humanities.

By the time I arrived, the Diggers, founded by Peter Coyote and Peter Berg, who met at the San Francisco Mime Troupe, had left town. The Diggers were an anarchist group which provided free food, health care and shelter in the Haight Ashbury, but then merged with other communal groups to form the Free Family.

Steve Gaskin, 1969

Steve Gaskin, a teacher at San Francisco State, was giving Monday Night Class in an auditorium on Ocean Beach (also used for rock concerts), attended by hundreds of people up and down the coast. He had been greatly affected by his psychedelic experiences and was a proponent of right livelihood and ecological practices. One night, Alan Ginsberg introduced Swami Bhaktivedanta to the group, unleashing the Hare Krishna movement upon the city! I certainly never went to Monday Night Class, but we were all very aware when Gaskin collected a caravan of over 60 vehicles in 1970 and left San Francisco, traveling across country and forming an intentional community at The Farm in Tennessee.

Werner Erhard started his est seminars in San Francisco in 1971. After a Dale Carnegie course and teaching Mind Dynamics, he felt he could develop a course of his own. Hundreds of thousands of people took est training which fueled the personal growth industry of the 1970’s.

I felt inoculated from much of this discussion by my powerful Lutheran background and I was too independent to become involved in communal movements. Being able to support myself meant that I could think what I liked, and in the shifting friendships and involvements of those years, world literature was my guide.

Neither Line nor Marty are bowled over by the self-styled gurus arising around them. Line goes Sufi dancing which leads her to herbal healers and teachers as well as the early women who worked with natural childbirth. But she is pragmatic and working at a hospital. Marty plots an aesthetic course, studying photography and reading Russian literature in addition to working full time. Nevertheless, the winds of exploration blowing through the Bay Area, the storms of controversy, and “the sunshine of your love” all wafted through their lives to some effect.

First Computer

In 1970 I got a job with the legal publishing company Bancroft-Whitney typing case summaries dictated by attorneys. In a large light-filled room on an upper floor of a brick building south of Market in San Francisco, eight of us did this work day after day. (In truth, work was secondary to the lively cultural traffic in the office! Probably no different than it is today.) In the corner was a large computer terminal, which came to life when a computer at the home office in Rochester, New York, called it through a WATS line. When the beautiful girl who ran this behemoth quit, I got the job.

The point of this particular dictation was to composite indexes. Thus, an attorney could cite subjects of a case, dictate a page number and the computer in Rochester compiled the page numbers into a list, an index at the back of a book. This exacting work was done by only one attorney as the subjects must take a particular form. The job introduced me to the life many of us now have, in that we are at the mercy of the internet! (“You were doing cloud computing back in 1970,” says Don.)

It was frustrating to wait for the call which was supposed to happen each day at the same time. It didn’t always. Often one end or the other would lose communication, dropping the line. I had to figure out what had gotten saved and what hadn’t and how much work to re-do! I would be fuming in my corner, trying not to disturb others who were humming along at their work. The terminal used pin-fed green-and-white-lined paper. Due to deadlines, I sometimes worked Saturday mornings, though I took off another day of the week to make sure I was only working 40 hours.

Computers played a big part in my work life from then on. I typed and retyped manuscript on mag cards, cassette tapes (frustrating because when the writer added a paragraph, you had to go in and reformat a lot of data when it was stored in a limited, linear fashion!) and finally random access floppy disks. I ran Fortran programs written by the crack programmer Pat Schilling whenever she wanted to accomplish something. I was even part owner of a company which introduced computing to architects, the unique Design Logic, which contracted computer-aided drafting among other services.

Discovering databases was something of a watershed for me. Before relational databases came in, I could cause quite a bit of structure, slicing, dicing and reporting on data using dBaseIII and IV. (I made up databases for the characters in the novel I was working on as well!) Ditto for spreadsheets. For a while I worked at one of the early computer help desks, aptly called Computer Hand Holding.

Without a clear career path or even a desire for one, this becomes Marty’s experience. In her artistic life, she journals and takes still photographs. In the full flush of her new intellectual freedom, she doesn’t want to write for a living or get into the technical demands of professional photography. She gets better and better work in offices as her computer skills increase. But it isn’t without hazard or frustration, as most of us now know!

Food Revolution

Line, Marty and Paul’s mother was not very interested in cooking. She was a superb baker. She always started with the best ingredients and taught her kids to bake exquisite pies, cookies and delicious breads full of interesting grains (some they ground themselves). But for meals she provided the meat, potatoes and vegetable diet common to the post-war era. After a few years in which she researched Adele Davis’ ideas, she went back to using the prepared ingredients and frozen foods which were so available at the time. This was especially true after the older kids went to college and she began full-time teaching. The younger Mikkelsons recall that almost every recipe she used called for a packet of Lipton’s dried onion soup!

Throughout the 1950’s and the early 1960’s, big gardens played a part in the Mikkelsons’ lives. In Montauk, a fictional town in northeast Iowa, a half-acre garden was attached to the parsonage. Though planting in the spring was exciting, everything from the usual vegetables to sunflowers (to feed the big cardinals and bluejays in the winter), corn and peanuts, the kids’ enthusiasm for weeding and hoeing was tepid. The bounty from the garden was never wasted, however. Many of the vegetables were partially cooked and frozen for eating in the winter. Dad planted apple trees at each parsonage, but the Haroldson parsonage had no garden. Only a rhubarb patch.

Line’s cooking develops from living around so many people who came up from the South to work in Chicago. She learns how to cook okra, collards and fried chicken, to fry up hoecakes and make delicious cornbread. Money is short, and Line becomes expert at getting the most for her money at the new food co-ops run by activist groups. From ex-Texans, she learns how to soak and cook beans, refry them and wrap them with onions and tomatoes in tortillas.

Marty learns the romance of cooking from a year-long stay in Oxford with a family whose European values dictate great food every day. When she moves to Berkeley, the exposure to fresh and raw vegetables educates her palate even further. She doesn’t like salad, but she finds that no California meal is complete without it.

When Line joins Marty in San Francisco, they become even more excited about food. Any Saturday that someone with a car turns up, they go out to the farmers' market on Alemany Boulevard in the southern part of the city, and buy the fresh produce of the season. They were not necessarily vegetarians, but the cookbooks of the time celebrated the peasant meals that world travel was introducing to people with a desire to live lightly and well on our fragile earth.

Vegetarian Gourmet Cookery by Alan Hooker, which appeared in 1970, contained recipes influenced by Indian and peasant cuisines all over the world. Frances Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet came out in 1971, showing how to get complete proteins needed for health using particular vegetarian and sometimes dairy combinations. Laurel’s Kitchen, by Laurel Robertson, Carol Flinders, and Bronwen Godfrey first came out in 1976, again providing much information about vegetarian nutrition. The Moosewood Cookbook, completely hand-written and illustrated by Mollie Katzen, came out in 1977, reveling in the “health food” cooking of the restaurant collective she was part of in New York. Versions of all of these books are still in print and tattered copies can be found in my sisters’ and my kitchens even today!

It is hard to convey how exciting this revolution was, as today farmers’ markets abound and everyone at one point or another gets excited about real food. To the Mikkelson kids, however, who grew up on canned and frozen foods, packaged meats and Betty Crocker baking mixes, the idea that you could start from scratch and everything would taste better, and perhaps make you healthier, was heady indeed.