Facing the Page

 “Faced on the page, a difficult truth becomes a doorway… Where we are now becomes the stepping-point to where we’re headed next.” —Julia Cameron

From the Penguin Publishing Group

I did not remember why Harper Lee named her book To Kill a Mockingbird. I did not know what it meant.

I don’t know where I was when I first read that book many years ago—maybe I didn’t finish it. It is a book that will affect you differently at different times in your life.

I finished it this week.

“It’s a sin,” Atticus Finch tells his daughter Scout, “to kill a mockingbird.”

It was the only time she heard him use the word sin.  She doesn’t understand why and goes to her aunt, who tells her it’s because they do no harm. “They only sing their hearts out for us.”

Comments are that To Kill a Mockingbird symbolizes the loss of innocence. That's a gentle way of saying it. I say it represents the killing of innocence. Read the ending.

After Liz Gilbert commented on her podcast that To Kill a Mockingbird was the only book Harper Lee wrote, and she wished she had written others, I decided to look it up. She did, in fact, write another: Go Set a Watchman. It was written before To Kill a Mockingbird. The Watchman was rejected and morphed into the Mockingbird story. (See what a title can do?)

Here are the reasons I re-read Harper Lee’s book:

1.     I have heard for years that Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is considered the Prima Donna of novels. (I wanted to know what that looked like.)

2.     It won the Pulitzer Prize. (What are they looking for?)

3.     It had been banned. (Why?)

To ban that book would insinuate that the reader couldn’t see beyond the racism, couldn’t see beyond the ignorance, and the mores of the Depression era in the 1930’s. It was rural South. It was ignorant. It was racist. Yet, out of that morass, a noble individual emerged. A man of character and integrity. Scout, the narrator, daughter of the lawyer Atticus Finch, forced to defend an innocent Black Man accused by a white woman, a losing battle right off the bat, was 6 years old, a wild child, trying to understand and having to draw her own conclusions while minding adult authorities. It was a tricky business.

My Kindle kept stopping while I was reading that book, and I would have to restart it. That was the only book where that happened. I was beginning to think I was being censored. And it made me realize once again how vulnerable we are putting our books on Kindles--convenient, yes. Inexpensive, yes. But a switch could turn them off.

My husband and I also watched the movie To Kill a Mockingbird. I had seen it in the 60s. He had not. Gregory Peck was superb as Atticus Finch. The film captured the book's essence beautifully.

 Shari Watts contributed this:

Live long, live well and prosper,

Thoughts From the Tub

How many showers have we taken? How many baths?

A good place to think.

So, you’re an animal standing there washing your naked skin. For eons we as Homo sapiens have denied that we are animals. But look at yourself, you have skin, bone, muscles, and organs just like theirs. Why do you think schools teach comparative anatomy to doctors?

Parents have said, “We made a baby.” But they didn’t. They started the ball rolling, and LIFE took over.

Not one thought from those two people caused these two cells to begin dividing until it made a ball. That ball rolled in on itself, forming the two sides of an animal without human direction. That ball has dominant and recessive sides, yet a heart in the middle. Some conservation was necessary. A circulatory system was necessary to feed the cells, and a heart was born. Now how did that happen?

Cells within those two sides began to differentiate; that is, they became specialized. They knew which ones would be the eyes, the brain, the limbs, the organs, the nerves, the veins, the arteries, the toenails, the fingernails, and the eyelashes. And let’s put some hair on that naked little thing.

And we were born a chemical, electrical, neurological factory. We are a thinking, breathing, eating, drinking, reproducing system—one that can get the next ball rolling.

What a system.

LIFE is so amazing, I wonder why we aren’t all rolling on the ground laughing with joyful exuberance that we have it.

Theology tried to convince us that we are the supreme beings on the planet and that gave us dominion over the whole of the earth. So what did we do? We began using up its resources. We cut the trees. We killed animals for sport. We threw our trash in the rivers and ocean. And unlike other mammals, Homo sapiens became naked.

Why did that happen?

Remember the book, The Naked Ape?

I think its basic conclusion was that men liked naked butts, and natural selection brought it about. I don’t know; I think males bred with women who had hairy butts as well as naked ones. But then, individuals try to mate with the most attractive, strongest, or most cherished person in their society. And women try to make themselves more attractive and desirable. It’s an age-old story.

Even wolves want their pups to be strong, smart, virile, and capable of making the tribe survive. That is desirable in a species.

Being hairless helps keep parasites at bay, making it easier to get rid of mites and fleas. Gosh, those people lived before soap and insecticides were created. Praise the scientists.

Forget about all those smart-ass people who tried to exalt themselves and preach that we have dominion over all of the earth. They were pushing their agenda. Oh yeah, part of our animal nature is a pecking order, where the biggest, strongest, most powerful, or meanest can rally others to their cause and gain power over the rest of their species.

It’s push/pull. Humans have labeled it as a war between good and evil. They say we live in a dualistic world.

But there are moments when we are a sharing world.

There are people whose basic desire is to wage PEACE.

Sometimes the strongest don’t survive; the most cooperative do.

Some cultures don’t throw out their post-menopausal women; they don’t think a woman’s value is to produce; they know grandmothers can help a family thrive and, in turn, help their tribe survive. The whales do that as well.

Bachelor wolves who don’t produce offspring because the alpha male and female have that job tied up, yet they help the tribe by being uncles to the young. Some people have given their lives for others—doesn’t the military use people’s altruistic desire to convince men and women to be soldiers? They are protecting the homeland.

Some individuals have willingly laid down their lives for a cause they believed was worth the loss. Some have given their lives, their most precious commodity, for a friend. Others have deliberately driven their plane into a boat or a building because they were either following orders or believed in their rightness so strongly they thought it was worth it. Some were ignorant enough to believe they would be rewarded with 100 virgins.

Some cherish the earth so much it hurts their hearts to see it ravished.

It has taken us lifetimes to realize there was more to the story. (Although, through the ages, some individuals have seen it.)

It’s a nebulous thing. We see it. Then we question it. We don’t want to be fooled. Neither do we want to be foolish enough to believe anything. It’s tough. We see, we question. We’ve been taught to trust what can be proven, the nuts and bolts of the thing, yet the spirit of a thing often goes unnoticed. We sometimes have out-of-body experiences. We sometimes have near-death experiences. Poo-pooed or not, many believe. And many believe their own experience when they have a ”Knowingness” that turns out to be true—like, why was attendance poor on the day the World Trade Center fell to the ground?

Why do some people miss a plane that crashes?

Were they the chosen ones? Or did they listen to a still small voice others of us are too busy or too distracted to hear?

Men of the Bible wrote of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and tried to push it into one Supreme Being. We didn’t understand the Trinity.

Now we speak of the Body, Mind, Spirit connection and call it Holistic.

People have long believed in a power outside of us, and we have glimpses of it, but no proof. Still, some of us see the gift we call LIFE as miraculous.