During the pandemic, I thought sifting through major disappointments in my life and shaping them with words would help me face my endgame but when the war against Ukraine began, I found only despair – so many refugees fleeing their homeland because of war, want, oppression or climate catastrophes. Refugees and their children in Donegal challenged me to search for hope.  In exploring my sense of self I found seven sources of hope.

1. Gender identity: Discussion of Trans became unbearably polarised in the media during Covid. I lost heart in marketing my novel Michel-Michelle. Reading articles about young people using choking in sex brought questions about confusion between sex, gender and power. When young men describe how they need porn and images of sluts and whores to reach orgasm, it reflects our toxic double standards about freedom, equality and responsibility. I have hope that most young people have a much healthier approach to gender than the traumas which leak out into the media. I have hope they know the difference between erotic behaviour with the joys of sex, and psychotic behaviour with its delusions of pleasure in power and abuse. I have hope that a more fluid sense of masculine and feminine could undermine the polarisation between gender identities.

• Eco v Ego: Power struggles and policy failures in planting native trees in Ireland heightened my frustration and disappointment over the delays in planting a native woodland. Ash dieback in every hedgerow symbolised the carelessness of decades of neglect. When hockey, hurly and camogie sticks no longer hit with the strength and flexibility of ash we can mourn the inaction and ignorance of the past but it is not too late to plant other trees. Planting thousands of trees in Donegal in Doirinis in April 2021 gave me hope that one day long past my day, red squirrels can once again wander freely above the heads of children below. Waste wood can warm our homes and provide shelter for creatures we don’t even see. Your children and their children will teach their elders about the plants, trees and water which bind the planet together.

• Love-life: Travel restrictions during the pandemic brought disappointments which challenged my life partnership and friendships. Schorse lived and worked in Berlin when we met and we have travelled between Germany and Ireland over the last twenty-five years. The pandemic showed the vulnerability of a relationship which depended on good health and cheap flights. And what about the cost to the climate of those flights? And what about those friendships – would they survive the strain of distance and separation? Would Schorse and I ever live together? His retirement in 2023 gives us hope of sharing our endgame and friends will visit the native woodland as it grows.

• Equality and Diversity: My despair in 2022 brought questions over whether all those years campaigning for equality were a waste of time. The steadily increasing gap between rich and poor in my lifetime threatens our survival on the planet and the most exploited suffer first. Research shows a wide gap between rich and poor undermines the health and welfare of the rich as well as starving the poor. There is hope in the growing awareness of how our over consumption in rich countries feeds the dinosaurs of global finance who have a vested interest in inequality. There will be a new  economic system. Who will design it?

• Idols and Icons: When a writer in my Donegal writing group alerted me to the Kardashian family as major icons whom I hadn’t even heard of, I struggled to connect the diversity of icons in the 21^st century and what they say about us. Images of the goddess at Greenham Common merged with Brigid the pagan goddess and Brigid the first Irish woman bishop and helped me make connections between a craving for scientific certainty and the mysteries of the human spirit which connects body and mind.  I hope a stronger sense of self can eliminate the need for icons and idols.

• Ulster and Brexit: The pandemic distracted from the reality of Brexit. The threat of renewed violence and polarisation between British identity and Irish nationalism brings uncertainty. On the Ulster border no-one wants a hard border so hopefully compromise on customs and trade can avert this threat. Co-operation over the nature that binds us together on this island can offer new ways of exploring unity.

• Writing:. In March 2020, Victorina Press launched my novel Michel-Michelle at the Irish Writers’ Centre in Dublin. As we gathered we were unaware Covid was also present in the room but within days it dominated our consciousness. I retreated to lockdown in Donegal and its aftermath as we zoomed around the emerging new world order. Plans for readings to promote Michel-Michelle in libraries, bookshops and events were crossed out of the future. In 2021 I finished another novel but was reluctant to publish it. Even close friends found Michel-Michelle hard to read and reviewers from the trans community didn’t like it either.  Why release new fictional characters to live in unsold books in an unknown world?  Why create fictional characters when I am a character worth exploring. Trees led me into a labyrinth of roots and memories of the last seven decades. Trees persuaded me to share some of those on my blog. 

With the help of the ghosts of dead friends and the planting of a native woodland a new sense of self emerged from the cocoon imposed on me during the pandemic. My fingers on the lonely laptop tuned into my despair. A sense of self which is resistant to manipulation and is not dependent on the opinion of others emerged. Arthritis in my hands reminds me to search out others and cry out to the next generation to be alert to the shift into a new world order. We all have a part to play in shaping it. Inaction is dangerous and words are not enough.

The post Zwitter first appeared on Margo Gorman.

The dying ash at my window takes me back to lockdown during the pandemic.The threat of danger and death rustled through me as I lay in bed and watched the ash tree suffering the slow death of ash dieback. I felt trapped in delays. Would I be able to plant the native woodland or would covid put that on hold too? The swish of ash in hockey sticks and hurly sticks remind me to explore the roots of  connection between people and trees, between human nature and the natural world..

Ghosts of dead friends, Margaret Coulson, Anthony Peppiat, Jaya Graves, Ann Brown and John Shiers,  persuade me to face my disappointment over the increasing polarisation between women as women and Trans people which accelerated during the pandemic. Another reason to retreat from publicity for my novel, Michel-Michelle where I explore the complexities of family relationships and understanding when the birth father of the main character transitioned. I find a sensitive piece by Valentijn De Hingh on the “trans debate” , the reflection and compassion. (thecorrespondent.com) comfort me. The binaries of good and evil or men versus women are not helpful when dealing with the complexity and vulnerability of gender identity.

The tree position in yoga spirals me backwards to the copse of trees near the freshly built public housing of 1950’s Ulster. I feel the roots of my despair in the seven-year-old catholic girl who is forbidden to return to the copse  with the seven-year old protestant boy. I close my eyes and balance on one leg as I look out the big window with its view of Donegal Bay.  “I talk to the trees but they don’t listen to me.” The folksong sung so sweetly by my little sister rings around the decades of the rosary murmured so long ago. Proust at least had the grace to realise it was he who couldn’t understand what the trees wanted to say to him. I listen to the trees who shake their leaves at the naivete of humans who are far from understanding the language of our shared nature. We ignore another version of the truth as it wafts towards us on the wind. I find hope in the stories of natural science.

Scientists recorded how tree flowers use male and female sexual parts for propagation, based upon appearance of certain flowers at one point in time. Scientists did not know yet that sexual appearance and function are not tightly bound in trees. It is not what flowers look like, but how they function over time that determines a tree’s true gender. Thanks to more recent research we now know there is great variation in tree flowering. Tree sexual classes are not always as they appear nor are they discrete opposites. In a group of trees of the same species, some trees might generate only male flowers while other trees might generate only female flowers. In some species, a group of trees could have co-sexual, male and female parts. A predominantly male tree might generate a scattered few female or co-sexual flowers. A predominately co-sexual tree might generate a few male flowers. A predominately female tree could generate occasional co-sexual flowers.

In flowering trees, tree gender can change — from season to season, over the life of a tree, as the environment changes, or indeed gender can remain constant for life according to research by Dr. Coder (1) As I enter the winter season of my lifetime, I take comfort from trees and their diversity. My roots and branches hold memories of the naivete of Spring, the bloom of bisexual Summer, the rusty gold of transition to Autumn and the wrapped up wisdom of Winter.  The native woodland planted during the pandemic in Donegal is a testament to survival of nature and the human spirit.

• Tree Gender: Tree Gender: Sexual Reproduction Strategies Sexual Reproduction Strategies by Dr. Kim D. Coder, Professor of Tree Biology & Health Care Warnell School of Forestry & Natural Resources, University of Georgia, USA

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Fear and desire

The fear is back. The planet rockets through another war towards complete instability.  I am afraid I cannot find the sense of self which will help me survive. Over breakfast alone on this Donegal hillside, fear transports me down the spiral of time back to Brussels. I have only a vague recollection of the area where I emerged from the subway station. This unfamiliar area is very different from where I lived near Chaussee de Wavre with its enclaves and flavours of the vast continent of Africa. In this area of Brussels, straight streets take me through steely glass buildings as I locate the counsellor recommended to me. He leads me into his office. I speak of my anger and frustration, which I want to channel into energy for change, but I am blocked by fear and anxiety.

A chaffinch flies against the window and startles me into the present. When she pecks for crumbs on the ground, I spot there are some missing tail feathers – it is my Spring surprise visitor? Over a Spring breakfast, I heard a sound upstairs. When I entered the bedroom, fear throbbed through both of us.  I opened the window wide. Fledging panic helped me focus. I spoke quietly to the pulsing bundle of life which I managed to cup into my hands. I reached out the window. Ben Bulben in the distance is clearly outlined against the sunny sky above the nearby oak planted only 15 years ago but already above the house. The fluffy bundle of anxiety flew out of my hands and over my head back into the room where she huddled in a corner. Mmm. I opened the skylight window too. Do you need more time to calm down or is there something out there which threatens you? I asked as I closed the door on the fledgling fear and went downstairs to finish breakfast and contemplate my next move.

The counsellor in Brussels challenged me when I claimed to have simultaneous feelings of anger, fear, and desire. He told me I need to learn to distinguish between emotions as they alternate. He shared stories of his daughter who thought he didn’t love her when he refused to help her make a choice between studying psychology or business. I didn’t follow his analysis. I searched the empty polish of the desk between us for some sign to help me to decide whether it is worth attending his Saturday seminar. I decided it was worth the risk of a Saturday and 50 euros.

As I walked back to the subway station, my  fears and desires mingle with the recent loss from cancer of my closest friend who helped me through every crisis. Fear and desire mingleddd in my  precarious  income in the isolation of a home-office in Brussels , fear and desire mingled in the uncertainty of my future and the future of the European network I worked for. I had given up dreams of writing fiction. The collapse of Au Coeur de la Communication (In the heart of communication) in Paris meant I could not go there for help. I felt anger at the counsellor because of his insistence I cannot feel opposing emotions simultaneously. I wanted to show him how emotions could live together in the unity of soft and hard, loathing and desire,  love and hate, anger, and forgiveness. I resolved to put his boundaries and their dualism to the test.

The seminar room and the other participants are a blur of shared experiences and his analysis. There were windows and there were chairs, but this was no cushioned oasis. It was functional. His hand reaches out as he puts fear on the back of one hand.  He tells us our fears are a reversal of our  deepest desires and turns his hand over to find the hidden desire. I miss the example he extracts from the group as  fear of failure feeds the comfort blanket of my low self-esteem and lack of confidence. I dabble my toes in the pool of emotions seeking to distinguish frogspawn from plants.  As I listen more closely, I begin to distinguish patterns and choices that I missed before. The ambitions of others in the group helps. I felt the relief of hopping off the management career ladder giving space for renewal of desire. The example of someone learning to ride a bicycle helps. Desire lifts your head up to a better balance. Fear of falling brings wobbles.

If you docus on the fear he suggests, you will find relief because you will unconsciously fulfil this fear to stop it dominating your consciousness. Fear fulfilled is a relief from the pain of living with the anxiety. Wobbling on a bike, fear of a falling and a cut knee repaired. No broken bones. Relief is good but you will not fulfil the desires hidden by your fears. Would focusing on the desire to stay steady and upright on the bike be a better use of energy and save the hassle of a cut knee or the risk of worse? I think of my best friend and the fear of cancer, death, and depression. Is it easier to live and die with fulfilled fear than the disappointment of broken dreams? I am afraid I won’t find the way back to Ireland from Brussels. If I move to Donegal, how can I support myself? Where will I live?

I turn the fear of the future over and put the dream place in Donegal on my palm. He asks me if we can use my example for a group exercise. I agree and he unfolds a leather trolley not unlike a massage couch. He asks me to lie on it while he guides me away from fear and into desire. I articulate my visualisation of a house with a view over Donegal  Bay on the farm where my grandfather lived. I am surrounded by the curious faces of the group as he guides me towards fulfilment of my dream. After the seminar the image of myself looking out of a window overlooking Donegal Bay remained with me.

25 years after this workshop and after breakfast, I go upstairs again to the room with the window overlooking Donegal Bay. Some of my fear has been overcome and desire has materialised in a mature garden in what was once a field grazing sheep. The shrubs and plants around the house provide homes for a great variety of birds. I listen at the door of the room upstairs where the fledging sought refuge. No sound. Is she gone? No, she flies up as I open the door but this time, she makes it through the skylight to freedom.

I am left alone to ask myself why my fear is back. What am I afraid of now and can I work on fulfilling the desire that my fear cloaks? The pandemic has clogged my desires with anxieties. In a more and more unstable world, children are cannon fodder, displaced or hungry. The garden flourishes but it still reminds me of climate change and the uncertain future it will bring. I remind myself of the transformation from a sheep field into a haven for plants, trees, and birds. It is never too late to make some difference. I will find a network of people who care about nature including our human nature. I will cut consumption of goods.  I have time and energy to locate the depth of hope which can counter despair at the state of the world. Among the many tits, robins, blackbirds, finches, and doves who visit the garden, the one with some tail feathers missing struts across the back step again. Is she the fledging who retreated in fear from a predator outside into the room upstairs. Is she the one who decided to choose her time to fly out and up?

The post X for fear first appeared on Margo Gorman.

W is for women especially those who have campaigned for human rights for centuries. W is for the Will to align human rights with nature. W is for a Writer who has wobbled into the Wood Wide Web.

W is for wobble as I stand in the tree position for yoga. I write because I must but 2022 and 2023 brought despair and with it my fiction writing slipped into silence. Words need readers to match writers’ wishes. Wishes cannot be expressed in words only. My sense of self tunes into wordless nature which whispers radical changes in my everyday life. More local networking and co-operation across borders. The woodland planted in 2021 in the midst of a pandemic talks to me about my time. Time to consume less. Time to protect palm forests before they emerge on the supermarket aisles as biscuits and cakes. Time to listen the miners in Africa who feed the chips in our phones.  Time to cut down and cut out the plastic which turns up on the banks of Indonesian rivers. Time to connect again to Think Global, Act Local in a wood-wide-web.

Facing my wobble about writing brings back Sister Catherine, in the Convent of Mercy in Strabane who takes the eleven-year-old me aside and tells me that one day I will write my autobiography. Today I can balance better on my right leg as she pushes me forward in front of the class to talk about rain forests. After the 11plus exam which gave me a ticket to Grammar School, she took the class to plant a few square metres of shrubbery in the Convent Grounds. Shrubberies were no longer in Jane Austen novels so when I moved to Donegal decades later, I planted another shrubbery which grows now taller than the house. Enid Blyton gave me a copse which towers above the stream at the road.

Trees connect me to a couple of decades in Donegal. Trees remind me of the greater and greater concentration of wealth and power bringing hunger, hardship, and war. Trees remind me of a history greater than my lifetime. Myths and metaphors remind me of how interconnected we are with each other and with nature. I visit the healing well which predates Christianity near the 12^th Century Cistercian monastery in Ballyshannon. A green-veined common white butterfly flitting by reminds me of the popular myth recounted to us by a nun in school that a butterfly’s wing touching a flower can cause a hurricane on the other side of the world.  Proof that God sees everything. Nonsense of course but a more romantic metaphor than fossil fuels melting the North Pole.. I balance on the stone at the well. As I wobble towards the end of the gender alphabet, can I challenge the binary splits into US and THEM which distract us from the urgency of dealing with climate change at personal, political, and economic levels. Am I in danger of slipping into the sea and drowning in the silent depths of wishy-washy compromise?

Home again, I look at the lichen on the branch of an oak planted fifteen years ago which now towers above the terrace. Trees planted around the house nod at my white hair which has replaced the rebel redhead. Stories of the hidden life of trees told by Suzanne Simard and Peter Wohleben inspire hope that the hidden web of human nature can stop the plunder of our common Wealth. I put my faith in a tidal wave of justice with connections between the nature of plants, trees, earth and sea and our human nature.  

I throw a log in the wood burning stove and think of how trees hold back the floods of the future as I fill the kettle. Trees rustle moments of joy with paper for writing and for wrapping. Trees murmur rituals from the tree of Jesse, father of King David to the Christmas tree in St. Brigid’s Church in Ballintra.. The trees in the native woodland grow taller than me in less than two years. There will be a wood wide web of resistance. I will share my writing to find others who want to join the wood-wide-web. I decide to write a story for children.

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V for Virgin

The time spiral takes me to the 1950’s and 1960’s on a visit to a small Grotto to the Virgin Mary in Melmount graveyard in Strabane before transporting me to apparitions in the 1980’s and hurt from hypocrisy which lingers in our culture. The grotto in Melmount still exists but seems a long way from present day icons and idols It is even further from the concentration of economic power in global elites. Or is it? The word icon comes from the carved image of the figure of Christ used in religious ceremonies. Today it is used to describe people like the Kardashians, footballers, musicians, artists and other celebrities. Should we look beyond the masks of our icons?

On his night off, my father would take us to Melmount chapel to May devotions in honour of the Virgin Mother of God, where the whole community said the rosary followed by a litany of terms venerating Mary. The priest blessed us with a monstrance in the form of a gold Sun containing the body of the Son of God. The crucible pumped out incense from other worlds which spiral me back to May devotions when I visit a Russian Orthodox church in 1989 as the Soviet Union ant-capitalist experiment was crumbling. The Virgin Mother of God was a major icon in 1950’s Ireland and supervised virgins until they were protected by marriage to a man.. Statues or pictures of the Mother of God were second only to the Sacred Heart picture, which was a major icon in every Catholic living room. Images of the pope were in the same frame as an image of President Kennedy.

Grotto

As children the grotto in Melmount graveyard was a link to timeless myths transporting us from the mundane realities of sin, penalties and punishment into a better world where our imaginations could run riot. The grotto was a place of wonder where the cement studded with special stones sparkled in sunlight calling up the apparition and miracles at Lourdes. I remember it with ivy and trees around in the old graveyard. If the ivy ever existed outside of my imagination, it has been tidied away. The beads around the hands of the mythical purity of the Virgin were woven into decades of joyful, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries. In the litany of attributes accompanying the rosary, Mary is also Queen of heaven. The echo of Queen of Heaven in the grotto-cave joins with the Ulster icon of the Queen of England. She appeared on a silverplated coronation teaspoon in 1952 which we used in the good sugar bowl for decades. Her icon appeared also on other shelves or walls in Ulster accompanied by King William on his white horse on cups and saucers, tea towels and 12^th July banners of the mystical rose. Rosaries with the image of flowers and thorns offer comfort in the commemorations of the dead from Roman times.  Is the Irish Catholic rosary a link to the times before the Judeo-Christian God when the rose represented the Greek Goddess Aphrodite with the thorns drawing the red blood of the gods to earth?

Death in the grotto

In the last century when the mother of God was celebrated in every small community in Ireland with such a grotto it was a place where miracles murmured the search for salvation. In 1984, the death of the fifteen-year-old Ann Lovett prostrate in front of such a grotto with the dead body of her child, inspired a spirit of resistance in Ireland. The response to the death of Ann Lovett broke the silences of many Irish women who had babies “outside wedlock”. In an article in the Irish Times in 2017, Roisin Ingle acknowledges Ann Lovett’s death marked turning point in Irish culture.  She quotes Gay Byrne, an Irish radio and Television Icon, who received letters, which tell true stories which no fiction or re-enactment can begin to express #roisiningle. The letter writers thank Ann Lovett for giving them the courage to express what they have kept secret. “Her sacrifice was not in vain, is their point.”

Later in Ireland in 1984 came the Kerry babies’ scandal where a young woman was browbeaten into confession of a murder she hadn’t committed. Did she feel guilty about a hidden miscarriage from her relationship with a married man? These young women were declarations of resistance to the hypocrisy endemic in Irish society from what Anne Enright describes as “the community of the hurt” where everyone lived secretly and silently. (Article on Nuala O’Faolain in Irish Times 13/08/2022. Can they give us the courage to face the secrets, silences and hypocrisies of to-day?

Parallel worlds

In the 1980’s I lived in a parallel world in England. Troubled by the continued sectarian conflict in Ulster after I left Belfast, I diverted my energies to children’s rights, feminism and gay liberation. I danced to Siouxsie and the Banshees to help me shed my Catholic guilt. Siouxsie sang to my  memories of the parish priest who rode the altar issuing forth hot spittle while railing against courting couples in the hedgerow. Siouxie’s version of Icon rattled him from memory into resistance to Thatcher’s homophobic laws.

Icons – feed the fires

Icons – falling from the spires

Those words hang like vicious spittle

Dribbling from that tongue

Close your eyes to your lies

Force feed more pious meat

Moving Statues

In 1985, the year following Anne Lovett’s martyrdom, mass hysteria about moving statues of the Virgin Mary erupted. In Manchester, I watched bemused English newsreaders on BBC as Grottos in rural Ireland spun onto our TV screens or I observed Gay Byrne’s careful tone on RTE on a visit home to Strabane, reinforcing my horror at the battle ahead for Irish feminists. Our Lady didn’t appear around the border or in the UK. Her nearest apparition to Ulster was in Sligo. Ireland has a small population and it is easy to meet someone who knows someone you know but I have yet to speak to one of the 20000 people who flocked down country roads to rural grottos which dot the countryside of Ireland to view these apparitions. Yet the sincerity of the teenagers on YouTube videos of that time is palpable. Rural grottos with stone and ivy and greenery, lit by the moon can still churn up those childhood emotions where miracles might happen to save us from ourselves. If kinetic energy can create the apparitions people saw and shared with thousands of others, could we make better use of such energy?

The Angel Guardian failed us

Was the mass hysteria of the moving statures in 1985 a reaction to the parallel worlds in the Irish Catholic Free State? It does seem a mighty coincidence that the apparitions of the Queen of heaven were in the year following Ann Lovett’s death in the grotto and the Kerry babies scandal. In rural Ireland after the formation of the Irish state, peasants dreamt of salvation while  Archbishop Mc Quaid silenced critics, bought shares in Irish companies and had tea with Dev Valera. The unemployed joined England’s working class. We had not yet faced the public scandals of child abuse or Magdalen laundries but the contradictions and connections lived with spirits in the grottos. Were these apparitions a reaction to the festering boils of abuse of women and children in Catholic Ireland?

In the Irish parallel world of the 1980’s, hypocrisy was still alive and well. In my childhood, the Angel Guardian, was “my guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here, ever this day at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen’. He also guided the Irish government to replace bogs with cash crop pine and businessmen to lay the foundations for the Angels lap-dancing club which later emerged in Dublin. When blood-sucking vampires were facing a decline in virgins, the icon of Dracula could hover between Sligo and Clontarf ready to make it with a hundred thousand welcomes into the tourist business and The stories of the many Ann Lovetts and their peers are now part of the silent history of grandmothers and great-aunts.

21^st century Icons

In this century there has been a dramatic shift in the quantity of Icons and Idols which flash onto our screens. When I was a child the few available were saints, actors on a small TV screen or cinema, characters in books from the library, political leaders like James Connolly or John F Kennedy. Now the constant barrage of media images shout wealth and celebrity as a potential goal for everyone if you can get the clicks. The stereotypical Idol of to-day is more likely to be a member of the Kardashian family than the Virgin mother in the Grotto, Nelson Mandela or Che Guevarra. The Kardashian reality reflects how exposure of the vulnerability in sex and gender, including Trans identity, can be incorporated into the badge of power-celebrity while discrimination continues in the parallel everyday reality of LBGTQ+.

Does the silent history of gender inequality hold any lessons for the present and future? Was the human sacrifice of Ann Lovett in a grotto in Longford in vain? When Candy Warhol explores what makes a queer icon, she describes how gays are inspired by icons like Judy Garland who died at 47 in 1969 because “their story, their struggle, their journey” has a “bittersweet mix of glamour and tragedy.”  (Article on Dublin Fringe Festival 2022 @gcn @candywarholqueen). “Think The Wizard of Oz meets Thelma and Louise” she says.

Do we need icons and idols to help us tell our story and recreate our human nature on the planet? Can icons play a positive role in resistance?

The post V for Virgin first appeared on Margo Gorman.

Sitting on a hill in Donegal, far from cities but closer to neolithic history, the stone ditches around my fields demand that I look for hope in strange places. The story of a modern naked Emperor joins me in the shower with memories of Merseyside, Trade Unions and Save the Children.

My time spiral transports me to the motorway journeys forty years ago between Manchester and Liverpool on my way to support local self-help projects as manager for Save the Children Fund. I admired the sky above the towering chimneys belching out weird greens and blues which mixed with the declining sunset. I carried the confidence that we could change cultures of discrimination with the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Children. We knew how to change laws which had a direct impact on rehousing women and their children forced out through domestic violence or Travellers who could not find a place to park their mobile homes. The website on one of those projects, Amadudu.org a refuge for Black and ethnic minority women and children who are escaping domestic abuse still survives but this is not enough to comfort me as we face an increase in domestic violence, racism and femicide alongside the parallel growth of hidden empires which threatens the future of all our children.

In 1990’s when I travelled the motorway between Manchester from Liverpool the strange colours from a mix of chemicals and sunlight conjure up the mighty shifts in living conditions, class mobility and gender. Developments which brought the upward spiral of  fame to some local Liverpool lads. In 1962, Ringo Starr of Beatles fame performed in Port Sunlight the village created by William Lever for workers at the Sunlight Soap factory. It is now a museum which you can visit. I was unaware as I drove the motorway of the dirty history hidden in the strange smoke signals above Port Sunlight connecting the shower gel or shampoo in my shower which replaced soap. The shower gel in my palm could have given me clues to the operation of forces more powerful than the nation state and its laws – clues to the way wealth has accumulated bringing migration, homelessness, poverty, and extinction of living species.

In 2022, in the London Review of Books (REF), I read about how the founding father of what is now the Unilever empire used racism to justify his exploitation of the land and people of Congo to expand the Lever brothers’ empire. In a letter to a company director, he wrote ‘it is a well-known fact that the brain of the African ceases to be capable of receiving new impressions when he arrives at the adult stage’? The long history of racism covers up economic exploitation has been eloquently covered by Toni Morrison who explores the invention of racism and sexism to justify oppression. Degradation of our environment and degradation of our human nature go hand in hand. As Toni Morrison says, “the spotlight turns away and shines not on the object of degradation but on its creator.”

To-day I am struck by the naked intimacy of our connections to the exploitation of palm oil and the Africans who worked on the Lever plantations in the Congo without which there would be no Unilever Empire to-day. How come the people of Congo are so poor when they created so much luxury in our world?  Even today the vaults below the surface  in Congo contain  riches which our technology needs but the people are among the poorest in the world. Toppling statues of the dead does little to uncover our hidden everyday collaboration with corruption and greed. Our lives in 190 countries are connected every time we consume “Unilever products which include food, condiments, ice cream, cleaning agents, beauty products, and personal care.”  Check your cupboards or look for the U on the packet or jar before you wash your hands.

Paul Polman once CEO of Unilever has said it is obscene to pay CEO’s of mighty economic Empires 12 million pounds or more and that companies should be putting into society more than they take out. According to his environmental balance sheet we should focus on the future we are stealing decade by decade from  young children.

When I look up the Leverhulme Trust which funds research in UK Universities, I find it is “recruited from the highest levels of Unilever.” The Trust is committed to best practice “including checks on the rights of employees, agency workers contractors and volunteers” The Trust assesses its suppliers “to ensure that they have appropriate policies in place to minimise the risk of slavery and human trafficking in their business and engage with environmental, social and governance issues”. With such a huge global enterprise it is not surprising that Ethical consumer researchers have over the years identified some problems in practice and identified “several ethical issues with Unilever, including environmental reporting, habitats & resources, palm oil, pollution and toxics, human rights, workers’ rights, supply chain management, irresponsible marketing, animal rights, animal testing, factory farming, anti-social finance”.

The temptation to blame the emperor and wash away our own collaboration is strong. The individuals in the Empire of Unilever are no better or worse humans than the rest of us who are all caught in the industrial machine and packaged dreams of finance capital. Unilever has its head office in the UK and Ireland for 90 years. The emperor is on our doorstep and expects us to admire his cloak with the gems of flattery of marketeers and public relations consultants but a cloak of fine words cannot conceal the naked profit motive. Unilever’s  “investment decisions are predominantly driven by economic concern”  It is time to remind the emperor of the two swindlers who told the court they would design an outfit which could only be seen by the wise. It took a child to point out that  flattering words of the “wise”  were not enough to cover the emperor’s naked body. The packaged Dove will  not bring him peace and the Lifebuoy soap will not save him from floods.

And Unilever is one of the best with at least a desire to improve human rights and care for the planet.  The Trade Union, UNITE has urged Unilever to ‘consider long-term sustainable trends – for both the company and its workers – rather than the fickle fluctuations of the money markets’ Unilever have made a commitment to look at the global supply chain of labour with a target date of 2030. If shareholders, consumers, and staff all demanded cleaner soap then investment decisions would be based on the survival of human, animal, and plant life and not on naked profit.

Unilever has managers, workers, consumers, investors in 190 countries. Who among us will find ways to respond to Unilever’s stated desire for us to “feel good, look good and get more out of life” when we step out of the river, the ocean, or the shower? After a bout of skin cancer, I replaced the shower gels with soap made in Donegal and avoid palm oil. I can still find U on products in my cupboard.

The post U for Uncertainty first appeared on Margo Gorman.

Inspiration

A strange set of coincidences prompted by a BBC documentary on Irish Travellers led me to work with Rom/Traveller families for Save the Children in the UK in 1980. Among the many Travellers/Rom who inspired me was Anisa Vrankx. She was at the time General Secretary of the Romani Union, recognised by the United Nations in 1979 but also invisible to the media as she didn’t fit any of the stereotypes. Encounters with Anisa in  Birmingham, Granada, Brussels/Gent, Warsaw, Auschwitz, Krakow, Udaipur, Béziers, Alicante, Granada were lived experience of identity and place. Anisa reinforced my belief that deep exchange between cultures is important in the struggle against the binary opposition of US versus THEM.

Silk Road

According to National Geographic the term Silk Road refers to “a network of routes used by traders for more than 1,500 years, from when the Han dynasty of China opened trade in 130 B.C.E. until 1453 C.E., when the Ottoman Empire closed off trade with the West.” Anisa’s  story took me through Sanskrit to the roots of Roma in the Banjara in India. She infused stony reality with the magic of Samarkand along the Silk Road. Movement of people followed the reality of sunlight and firelight, spices and oils, the heat of animal excrement and goods traded. The Silk Road is not a romantic story as the tents blew in the wind and the route was either too hot or too cold but it is a reminder that movement, trade and migration are part of our shared history. It is a reminder to question thee strange acceleration of pressure in the last one hundred years. The use of fossil fuels create patterns of consumption which combine with gross inequalities in the use and distribution of the earth’s resources to bring us to the point of collapse.

As I take a coffee break with the Guardian weekly, my imagination sits with a family crouching over a fire in a refugee camp to prepare coffee for a journalist who will write about them to remind us of the 100 million refugees, half of them children, who travel the world and are stuck in camps with stories to tell. Nomadic history is a good reminder  of the stories of human migration through the centuries which cross and recross familiar and unfamiliar landscape and cityscape. The Silk Route is symbolic of the history of diverse cultures,  traditions and rituals whose common roots are modified as we pass through time. To-day’s forms of trade and accumulation of power bring climate change, war and migration.

Save the Children in the West Midlands

Anisa was born French and her father jumped off a transport to Auschwitz and family survived the Second World War in hiding. Anisa married a Rom but her free spirt was not made for marriage. Her tale of separation conjurs up an image of a campaigning woman in the flowing robes of a princess locked in a Greek villa – another version of 60’s feminism and independence which took Anisa later to India to research the roots of Romani peoples. When Anisa summarises her research of Romani belief systems in a booklet published in 1997, she echoes Virginia Woolf’s reference to the sun as representing love  when she claims “Romai religious feelings had different roots”  from the Christianised Europe they encountered. Their beliefs centre on the importance of the Sun and the solstice which celebrate the  “values of love, tolerance and generosity”. We are usually unaware of the close links between to-day’s belief systems or rituals and pre-Christian rituals. The effect of the sun on our mood even in citylife is still apparent and the solstice on 21 December celebrating the Sun God was easily transferred to Christmas.

From the West Midlands to Granada

Anisa invited some of the young women she met in England’s West Midlands to a conference organised by Rom Women in Granada. We travelled to Alicante where we bunked down in Anisa’s apartment before taking a bus to Granada. In preparation for the event, Traveller women made a banner with the Romani wheel symbol which was unfurled behind them on the platform, when the group from the West Midlands spoke. Among the hundreds of Rom from all over Spain, there were academics, teachers, lawyers – a revelation to the young Traveller women as role models of Rom/Travellers who had completed third level education in England were rare. Resistance, freedom, history and connection infused the air we breathed. The Irish Traveller and English Rom young women travelled in typical English skimpy summer clothes and I wondered if they would change for the evening celebration to mark the end of the conference.

Anisa introduced Margaret (colleague and the other chaperone) and me to a  Cuba Libre (rum and coke)  in the square while the young women dressed for the evening celebration on the hill above the Alhambra. When they emerged transformed by flowing flounces and jewellery with accounts of the help they had secured from the hotel staff, Anisa was not as surprised as we were at the communication skills of these first timers in Spain. Entry to the private celebration opened a new world through a  wooden gate in the wall and onto a path uphill above the Alhambra palace. White dresses reflected the warm shadowy light of the stars and moon. Outdoor flamenco with the full courtship ritual, the post conference buzz and our transformation into a timeless place where we could celebrate equality with the joy and sorrow of survival. I knew then this was a one-off to hold in my memory. I treasure the privilege of watching the flamenco with the ritual drama of fans and handkerchiefs  performed by one of the speakers at the conference as a celebration of a culture and not as a set piece for tourists. This space will never again be accessible to me as a visitor in Granada and sometimes I pinch myself again and email my friend and ex-colleague Margaret was it so or did I dream it? I wonder if the group treasure memories of this time too.

Anisa moved to France health reasons but lived for a good part of the year in Udaipur, Rajasthan to carry on her research on the Banjara roots of Rom. She recruited me to help  her briefly with one of her projects but she made sure we had time to explore Udaipur. Anisa’s office and her local networking was framed by the palaces and lakes of Udaipur and the ease with which she introduced me to the silky white beauty of the city. She also persuaded one of the three-wheel taxis to take us to the nearest of the hill forts surrounding the city for a gasp at the history around us.  When the monsoon times came every year she retreated to Béziers for health reasons. I visited her there only once and then I lost touch with her. I have only ever met one other to equal her spirit of resistance.

It is tempting to take out the rose-coloured spectacles and make exceptions of people like Anisa but there is nothing romantic about the persecution of those with a history of a nomadic way of life. Living in disconnection we lose contact with history and with  wilderness but we still hanker after connection with nature and migration. We are drawn towards travel to visit scattered family or to temporary accommodation in tents, caravans, hotels or holiday homes to experience other places.

Anisa paid a high prices for her spirit of resistance. Her activism denied her a life amongst her family and community. Memories of travelling with her instil a yearning for something beyond the binary battles of everyday polarisation where the grubbiness of daily life makes poverty intolerable. In the lived exchange between cultures there is a place of story, knowledge and music bringing out the love, solidarity and compassion buried in our human nature. The shadows of the past can meet the challenges of the present with the help of magic and mystery.

In Ireland we are a long way in time and space from the Silk Routes where the Banjara travelled from India centuries ago. Or are we? In the 21^st century we use the whole planet as a place to exploit for the benefit of a minority of its inhabitants or a place to experience “otherness” and exotica as distinct from  “real” life and the home place. Meeting Anisa helped me challenge stereotypical labels of Us and Them in Ireland Traveller women who graduated as mature students in Irish Universities share Anisa’s spirit of resistance. Brave spirits like Mike addressing Gay Pride 2022 remind us  how discrimination can cross cultures. Oein de Bhairduin’s retelling of stories told to him by his father is testament to the importance of oral traditions in Why the moon travels. Podcasts renew the oral tradition of story-skills. Rosaleen Mc Donagh’s multiple skills as academic, social worker, feminist, member of Aosdana, Traveller, playwright, disability activist and author present a simultaneous challenge to many stereotypes. 

Refugees, nomads and migrants can help us dissolve the aggressive territorial nationalism and xenophobia which has followed the path of former empires. The impact of radical changes in economic and financial trade on the planet in our lifetime is clear. The shift of the East-West economic axis in the 21^st century weaves space, place and time into fresh challenges.. In A Global Sense of Place, Doreen Massey traced how local spaces merge with global. In Return of the Native, Vron Ware peels back the layers of a corner of Gloucestshire to expose a place where we can where we can connect to past and present. Will the conflicts and wars in the world to-day combined with climate change bring an economic revolution even more radical than the Silk Routes and the  collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Empires which followed?

Banjararoma.org

Banjararoma@gmail.com

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Sense of Self in Berlin Cityscape

In Berlin, I wake up to the whirring hum and chuntering halt of the S-Bahn – a reminder to buy by weekly pass to give me freedom of the city. S-bahn is my favourite form of transport here because it is overground, fast and gives an insight into the “backside” of Berlin with graffiti art, back gardens and allotments. The transition from my Ulster Heimat to Berlin is a reminder of the early significance of the word Heimat in Germany when those who had to leave the countryside or small villages to work in cities expressed their loss as a longing for their Heimat of origin with regional dishes and customs. There is no equivalent word in English for Heimat, which is rooted in a sense of belonging to place and to a culture.

Ideas about Heimat have shifted in this century with the speed of  travel, global economics and the internet. Hopping on and off public transport in another life in Berlin is a far remove from the isolation of rural Donegal where we have no trains and no trams. The bus from Donegal town to Dublin Airport – a journey of three and a half hours – takes me through the polarisations of my Ulster identity as I cross the border with the UK between Ballyshannon and Enniskillen and then come back into the Republic at the border between Fermanagh and Cavan. Brexit has revived the border and potential for conflict in Northern Ireland.

Over breakfast in Berlin, I salivate over brochures for Theatre and film.  I welcome the exchange of ideas, the challenges and insights of other perspectives. We have a rather unorthodox living arrangement. My German life partner, successfully pursued by me in 1998, lives and works in community development in Mitte and is my guide through German literature, landscape, cityscape and Heimat. He has been in a V.G. (V.G. or Verein Gemeinsam is the shorthand for a group of people living together) with our friend Sabine for thirty-seven years.

Even in plural Berlin, the V.G. is not typical as the term is more common among students in temporary collective living arrangements. Reinickendorf has been a “home from home” for me for twenty-five years. Belonging to a group of people with some sense of being an “insider” rather than an “outsider”, I feel part of the cultural shorthand. I find a Heimat in Berlin.

Schorse passes me a page from Tagespeigel with yet another article to feed my obsession with belonging to more than one culture. Heimat often calls up some real or imaginary image which marks it as “home”. My Berlin Heimat is signalled by the village green with the small church – the main landmark for our neighbourhood in Reinickendorf. But Heimat is less and less about home as a specific place. . In the 21^st century with mobility from village to city, from country to country following work and family diversity, movement as workers, families, refugees or economic migrants brings diversity of cultures to every corner of the globe.

The core of Heimat is more the sense of belonging but belonging to what? When I spot a rainbow flag, I ask myself if LBGTQ+ a sense of belonging to a Heimat of identity. When I ask Jannis, Sabine’s son and a member of my Berlin extended family, he quotes someone saying Heimat is where I don’t need a password. His comment is a reminder of the speculations that the strong emphasis on Heimat in Germany today is generated by globalisation and digitalisation with its huge cultural shift reminiscent of the mighty changes engendered by industrialisation. Jannis  has also a spatial sense of belonging to Berlin – a certain feeling which is generated by his sight of  a significant landmark –  the television tower at Alexanderplatz – when he returns to Berlin after an absence.

In Berlin there is a sense that everything is possible. The launch of my first novel Bone and Blood. was in a cemetery, Alte St. Matthaeus Kirchhof, where Schorse gave us insights which took us from the Brothers Grimm, to early feminists, the German Resistance, a Gay collective and many more buried activists, whose energy vibrates there. Our next-door neighbour, Uta, wrote music to accompany the old English poem which inspired the title of my novel, Members of her choir, La Voix Mixte, performed it at the launch and later at another concert in Berlin. Sabine is also in the choir and did a Masters in Music Therapy, while working full time.

February was my favourite time in Berlin because of Sabine’s birthday and the Berlinale, the Berlin Film Festival. When the days were damp and cold, cinema bridged the dark days of Winter and Spring sunshine with a screen view into so many cultures. It was often my task to collect the group tickets for films selected by our V.G. I saw films from other continents as well as other European films, which may never reach general distribution or even film clubs. Changes in the Berlin Film Festival run parallel to changes in my relationship to Berlin over the Covid years and uncertainties about the future.

I first visited Berlin in the 1990’s when it was under reconstruction – leaving only remnants of Berlin’s wall between East and West. Like many visitors to Berlin, my first questions were about the location of the wall beyond the symbolic status of the Brandenburg Gate. Schorse and I tramped through building sites which were later to become landmarks of modern Berlin – the Sony Centre, the memorials to some of those killed attempting to cross from East to West along the riverbank between the border crossing point at FriedrickStrasse and the cupola of the Reichstag.

With my V.G. partners as guides, I have crossed and crossed former east and west and gradually realised the border also wove around Reinickendorf, which is a large borough in the North west of the city including Tegel lake. Tourist images in the style of Checkpoint Charlie or the remains of a high wall are supplemented by everyday stories of people once cut off from each other by strict borders between the capitalist west and communist east. Sections of Reinickendorf’s Berlin wall have trees, lakes or River Havel as boundaries, and are now replaced with cycle paths or footpaths. Schoenholz – the S-Bahn station a couple of stops from ours had a piece of the Berlin wall for over twenty-five years but even locals did not register it as part of the wall because it was part of a no-man’s land-boundary with neighbouring Pankow. Some years ago it was identified and verified, it is now protected as an official monument.

As Berlin’s S-Bahn leaves Bernauer Strasse with its chunk of wall, museum and church of Reconciliation constructed on the site where once a church was blown up,  I listen to the sound of Berlin’s past when the trains would dim their lights as they travelled under what was the “East” and the Western passengers could see the ghostly outline of Eastern guards at stations closed during the years of the wall. I revel in hopping on and off public transport in another life here – a far remove from the isolation of rural Donegal where we have no trains, underground or overground and no trams. Buses have replaced a once extensive railway system which can now only be seen in Donegal Town’s Railway Museum.

From Reinickendorf to Mitte has been a frequent journey by bike or public transport. For twenty-five years, my life partner, Schorse, has been a mainstay of Sprengelhaus – a neighbourhood intercultural and social centre in Sprengel Kiez. Sixty organisations rent offices and activity rooms. I live and breathe the exchanges where the diversity of origin is celebrated and where democracy projects link past and present. Sprengel Kiez  has become part of my sense of self in a fast-changing world.. When Comic Opera staged a musical in Sprengelhaus, the mix of refugees, migrants and locals enjoying opera pieces from a range of cultures symbolised a sense of unity in diversity where I could feel at home.. I marvelled at how this highly professional opera company can bring a treat reserved for the elite in Ireland to such a mixed group. As we connected, laughed and clapped together.

Heimat is place and people, solidarity in sharing food and learning more about each other. I have sampled cuisine from many African countries, from Iran, Afghanistan and regional Germany. Once it was my turn to cook Irish stew, In Sprengelhaus I have enjoyed meals cooked by politicians , whom I now see on the German news. Back in Reinickendorf, the V.G. cooking group chops vegetables for the evening meal, Sabine arrives back in Reinickendorf from Marzahn, a borough in the former east of Berlin where she works with participative planning. Marcus, Sabine’s partner has arrived and installed himself at his laptop. He tears himself away from an article on the ethics of human rights to join the cooking group. We are tempted into discussion on the state of the world over a glass of wine.  

Back in Donegal I leaf through memories. Berlinale brochures or Theatre programmes for Gorki theatre a Hans Fallada adaptation for stage with English translation above the stage or watching Brian Friel’s play adaptation of Turgenev’s play, performed in German. My sense of self struggles to understand the polarisation of North-South-East-West which explodes around us. The renewed threat of fascism, the conspiracy theories, on-going racism, threats to LBGTQ+ identities,  war and climate change undermine our fragile democracies. I refuse to let the uncertainties undermine my sense of self. I belong to a Heimat where we connect to diversity in our human nature and cultures and where we connect to the natural world wherever we are.

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Religion

St. Brigid’s day is now an official Irish holiday to match St. Patrick’s Day invoking the strange spiral of past, present, and future time where the paganism in our Irish culture co-exists with the Christian. St. Brigid’s day on 1^st February, marks the  halfway point between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox. Whether we are aware of it or not we use Christmas to see us through the winter solstice and the time change in March is based on the Spring equinox. St. Brigid’s cross, made with rushes, is an icon of Christianity but she used it to convert her pagan father on his deathbed with hopes of passing through death to eternal life of the spirit. Institutionalised religion bound into government of the people has taken us a long way from our connection to oak trees or rushes growing in the fields. I am now in pursuit of a path through the grove of Oak and other native trees which we planted during the pandemic in 2021. This path is symbolic of the spirit of resistance to the binary split between humans and nature which endangers our human nature on this planet.

I am embarrassed to admit to belief in forms of energy which have not yet been fully scrutinised by science such as the power of prayer, of mantras or other forms of generating positive energy for healing. Fear of falling foul of superstitious nonsense and suspicion of control over our thinking by cults makes me wary of sharing ideas on what” spirit” means. For me spiritual connection comes from a sense of self which connects earth and its elements with human energy and awareness. I have  collected a series of esoteric approaches to spirit and psyche but keep them on a secret shelf out of sight and rarely share my idiosyncratic beliefs. Happily, it is OK to acknowledge the broad power of emotions like love for animals, wildlife or children.

Three of my closest friends, with whom I shared my secret thoughts on connection between mind, body, and spirit, died of cancer. In my endgame, I miss them so much, I reach out now into the emptiness of their loss. Inspired by Allende’s success in a democratic election in Chile in the 1970s, Ann worked with Chilean refugees after the Pinochet coup. She went on to work on the unionisation of miners in South America in the 1980’s and 1990’s in the International Union of Miners. She put priority on better material conditions for miners and their families. John Shiers was an early campaigner for Gay Liberation, we worked together on children’s rights with Save the Children in the 1990’s. John also persuaded me to join Manchester’s Global Forum where I met Jaya. Jaya Graves was an early environmental campaigner and poet with vast life experience. Her legacy lives on in Southern Voices (southernvoices.org), a network “committed to bringing the knowledge and understanding of Southern* and Black* people to the global issues that are central to education and to living in the world today.”

Ann and I started school together in 1955 and she saw me through many crises until her death when we were both fifty. On one of my visits to  Ann in Brussels we sat on cushions in her living room reading. I had a burn-out crisis in my work with Save the Children, she had recurring cancer. I was working my way through her Elmore Leonard collection; she was reading a book by the oncologist Carl Simonton. When she reached the passage on the importance of the spirit in dealing with cancer, she became impatient and threw the book at me and told me to read it for her as anything “spiritual” was more my “thing”. She was also a student of Clare Nuer at the time and I chose to take courses in Paris with “Au Couer de la Communication” on her advice. It got me through burn-out.

John Shiers and I bonded when I confessed one day at the Manchester Office of Save the Children that I had just spent a weekend on the Silva method of Mind Control. I picked up the book on mind control by Joseph Silva from the bedside of another close friend and poet. Turmoil in my lesbian relationships, the Catholic guilt lurking in my brain cells and the demands of working for the rights of Traveller children in England, followed by a generic management role had depleted my emotional reserves. Could my brain power offer some help? Could techniques of mind control help me control the unruly mix playing ball in my mind? To my amazement John had done the course before me. It reinforced  links and solidarity between us as we worked and networked together through the challenges of Thatcher’s Britain.

Jaya and John were both Buddhists in their final years. In addition to her work with Southern Voices, Jaya sought to bring together the warring factions in Buddhism in England in a bi-annual conference in Manchester. Jaya’s article in the Guardian newspaper 28^th October 2010 on Buddhism makes the distinction between religion as God worship and spiritual practice better than I can.

According to Jaya, “Buddhism is often defined as a religion. Books on the subject are tumbled into religious sections of libraries and bookshops. Occasionally, they appear on philosophy shelves. But how does it define itself? Buddhists refer to the “dharma” – the way. Buddhism is not a theistic religion. There is no creator god issuing commandments, judging or punishing. Nor is there anyone who promises salvation. Salvation is possible, even inevitable, but we will reach it through our own efforts. Neither is Buddhism a philosophy. It aims to go beyond concepts, the domain of western philosophy. To do this it uses a rigorous investigation of inner and outer phenomena that include ideas, emotions, actions, and interactions. Phenomena are unstable and impermanent – a dance of particles – an instability we are unable to control. We cannot create permanence.

Imagining we can control phenomena creates many of our current delusions and anxiety. And from this stems our conflicts with ourselves, with each other, between neighbourhoods and nations. Since the data of our human situation are subject to continual change it follows that our investigation must also be continuous and our conclusions must be adjusted. This personal investigation is central to Buddhist practice. There are no laboratories. No contrived replication. For this reason, the process is sometimes dismissed as subjective and unscientific. It is not “evidence-based”. I argue that it is in fact tested and evidence-based but not necessarily within the western framework of investigation. It is personal but it is not subjective. We have the support of teachings and commentaries. Investigative practices have been explored and established. Skilled and wise researchers have “peer reviewed” these over millennia and continue to do so. But in the end it is our own inner tenacity, our passionate intention through which we must judge our path and progress.

This core practice is undertaken not only to create a degree of ease in ourselves but through a commitment to everything that lives. The development of compassion for all things is part of being human and cannot be conditional. It must include those with whom we agree, whose belief systems are congruent to our own as well as those we may traditionally see as enemies, whose belief systems challenge our own or whose interpretation of life is alien to ours. We need to be judicious but we cannot judge the person, only the action.

Buddhism is moving from the fringes to centre stage. It offers strategies to deal with fraught lives. Meditative practices can be oases of calm at home or in centres. It is not a continuous assault to make choices, make judgments, accumulate information, juggle loyalties. It turns the attention inward.

The binary frameworks generally used to explain or explore our experience are flawed. Contradiction is the stuff of our human condition. We are not asked to repress and destroy this. Instead, it is suggested that they obscure our true nature. We are urged to investigate these obscurations and are offered methods to transform them. So anger can become energy. Pain can teach us sympathy and concern for all.

Buddhism recognises that suffering is our inheritance and will be our legacy. It makes demands in how we locate ourselves in the world. For me, in this context, it raises questions about the infliction of a model of infinite growth on a finite system; of our assumptions of entitlement to resources; our profligate use and treatment of land and water. It challenges the notion that our main concern is “the family”. It isn’t. There is a family beyond the family, beyond the neighbourhood, beyond the state, the country. Nuclear families are only a microcosm of this. Our care has to be embedded in the wider context. It is not a competition. It is reconfiguration.” Jaya Graves

I am not attracted to Buddhist rituals as Jaya or John were but it helps to have a non-theistic approach to the contradictions between material and technological progress, and solidarity with our common humanity.  The war rages on between the gravitational pull to assertion of power through aggressive self-perpetuating wealth and the  transcendent call to connect through commitment to the compassion in our human nature.

The post R for Rainbow first appeared on Margo Gorman.

My first full-time permanent job was in 1972 in Polymark, a company in Shepherd’s Bush. London, producing print-on labels  which revolutionised sew-on labels. Since then, I have I lived through decades of labels, masks and badges. Now I put my tongue in my cheek when I label myself as an old-cis-woman-socialist-feminist-bisexual-Irish-European with a dash of British  Individual labels added together are still not enough to give me a sense of self. I had many identities and wore many masks in my transition from convent schoolgirl in an Ulster border town to a pensioner on the other side of the Ulster border many decades later . When I looked up the company Polymark to see if it still existed I was struck by the way they have diversified around the heat transfer system and now also do barcodes. As our identities move towards QR codification, I ask myself again about labels and what they do my sense of self.

When I read other Ulster writes who have been around for a while, like the writer-presenter John Kelly, I realise the historical period, class and place we grow up in are more  important than the masks we wear. In forging a sense of self  my emotions and  values  are at the heart of my identity. What have labels to say about my two motivating forces –  writing and climate action? How can labels help me explore  my main themes which are exploring gender, and human rights? Cultural exploration is tainted by the invention of  race. No labels describe how power over the “other” has been at the heart of the accumulation of wealth which has progressed steadily in my seventy plus years..

The pink dollar reminds me that art, culture, creativity, and family life have been subverted by  consumerism which feeds the extremes of wealth accumulation, and which in turn has brought human nature to a crisis point. We have “gone too far” but the problem is not the “alphabet soup” of identity. While we squabble about gender labels, stereotypes or toilet facilities,  right wing factions distract us from the main battle which is to reclaim our human nature with all its galactic connections, complexity and fluidity. I will explore my sense of self in a nature network.

The post Q? first appeared on Margo Gorman.