Novel by Christina Carson
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Quote from Suffer the Little Children:
"Perhaps what we call misfortune is actually a place where the universe interrupts our habits that keep life so limited and small, forcing us to respond differently. The opportunity it offers depends on how hard we work to close the gap or hold it open, allowing ourselves to glimpse realities we've never glimpsed before."
Novel by Christina Carson
Quote from Dying to Know:
"I knew in that moment, we were never meant to surrender our childlike innocence, to trade a world in which we fit like a glove for one that hung on us like ill-fitting hand-me-downs. However, all about us insisted on our membership. And instead of a handshake or a mystical password as entrance into this spurious society, we agreed instead to share a lie, the one that says we’re safe, secure, and fulfilled living this way."
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Good Fences Don't Make Good Neighbors
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The other night, Bert and I watched a film clip created by National Geographic that featured the border issues occurring between Mexico and the United States. I’m not interested in the politics involved, for politics is what we turn to when we have no real solutions, and in so doing, create an even greater mess. And worse yet, people become the chips on each of these gaming tables of life, and that is hard to bear. There is talk of making a wall there, crazy as that 2000 mile idea might be, one that is both actual and virtual, to wall us in and them out. But I agree with Robert Frost, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall…spills the upper boulders in the sun…”
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
The work of rabbit hunters, not these walls. These are hunters of people or people hunting freedom from hunger and despair.
Then, several days later, Bert and I watched the pilot for Borders, a Canadian TV series, and low and behold, the same notion of walls between borders was mentioned again—only this time along the world’s longest undefended border, that between the U.S. and Canada.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors?
Isn't it Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
And I’d ask one question more—why? What is it in us that makes us stubbornly unwilling to explore ourselves, our own nature, to see if there is not another way to understand life that sets us free rather imprisoning ourselves with our own fences. Can we truly believe that whatever created us gave us nothing more than the ability to squabble and fight?
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down."
I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors.
That last sentence is true only if you believe fear makes a wise motivator.
We will find no answers to our problems using the same conditioned thinking that created them. And will find no answers using the same frame of reference that thinking requires—us and them. Unfortunately, we seem to be at a point of evolution where we are still questioning if all things have a soul, a spirit that enlivens them, when it would help us dramatically to be at the point where we were asking instead, what is the true nature of this spirit, this element in the universe that brings Life. For fences don’t make neighbors at all. And if there was ever a time we needed to recognize we have good neighbors, we might be able to glimpse a grander truth as to why: we are them; they are us; we are one.
With thanks and love to Robert Frost, for his “Mending Walls.”
Comments
Fences may not make good neighbors and politics may be what some people turn to when they don't have solutions. But, fences have often helped good neighbors become better neighbors and politics is the art of compromise when practiced by those more skilled than the ones we currently have in office. The problems we face in America come from the fact that we are currently under assault from across our borders by people who believe that it is their right to take what we have earned because they think that we have stolen it. And, it is under assault by those from both within who do not love it and want to change it.
Compromise, in the end, does not work, for each party gives up something they in fact do want and sooner later will demand. If compromise worked we'd have treaties that held and considerably more peace than we now know. And as for the rest, we can agree to disagree.
It's so depressing to read that "compromise does not work." Of course you have to give something up.
It's not because of the inherent failure of compromise that treaties fail; it's because one party believes that bully action will get it something it wants, and loses empathy for the others.
America is not under threat from refugees; people fleeing across your borders are not coming to steal from it - they are coming for the "opportunities" that Americans so proudly proclaim.
Yes, that is what I said. Bullying just happens to be the way people take back what they originally gave up in the compromise. And I agree with your comment about refugees. Miss Liberty is likely most confused by these times.
It's a different situation in Australia - we are walled in by the ocean. And yet, we still have refugees coming by the boatload and illegal importantion of drugs and the like. A wall may not be the real answer, but they are real problems, and ones that cannot be ignored.
I wonder if compromise is not the answer, what is left except to take something by force? If two parties both want the same thing, and only one can have it, then either one agrees to give it up, or they fight it out.
Very thoughtful post, Christina! "we are them; they are us; we are one." Love this. LOVE it. What is so hard to understand?
The problem began with the concept of wanting to own that which cannot be owned.
"What is this you call property? It cannot be the earth, for the land is our mother, nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs only to him?" -Massasoit
"One does not sell the land people walk on." --Crazy Horse
"We do not own the freshness of the air or the sparkle of the water. How can you buy them from us?" -Sealth
Even Native peoples soon established territorial rights to certain parts of America among the many tribes. Intrusion into another tribe's territory was considered an invasion and was often met with warfare.
No one is guilt-free. The spirit of "community" and living selflessly for the common good seems a foreign concept to most of mankind. Until every last child is instilled with that concept from birth, there will continue to be borders and fences, yours and mine, us and them.
Robert Frost is one of my favorites, and I love his "Mending Walls." Here is the problem with walls as I see it. Am I building one to keep you from joining me, or am I building one to keep me from joining you? Either answer is a sad commentary on my life.
Thanks Ciara for your thoughtful comments. I write to attempt to get people to question seriously. There are no permanent answers to the problems we've created if we stay in the frame of mind of separation- I and thou. That's were the change must occur. Is it easy-NO. Is it possible-YES.
Jo, you are a blessing to this earth. I am going to reblog your loving reply.
Caleb, that is it in a nutshell.And by so doing, we ourselves birth the very fear that then infests us and encourages us to make our lives smaller still. We don't die so much as contract into our own black hole, when the experience here was meant to be one of expansion.
Going outside wearing these - Isabel Marant Sneakers
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