The Archetype of Mother

The Mother Archetype

 My mother (Julija) died when I was 19 so I’ve lived more years without her than with her.  This has elevated my mother to a figure of “Mother”, an archetype more than a real person and this is how I experienced her for many years.   It started with her long illness which gave a face to suffering and I can still see the grimace of pain on her face even at death.    

     Now I’m approaching the age she was when she was first diagnosed with cancer.  And I am rediscovering a person beyond the martyr or the “Mother.”  She was the one who was the center of attention, the one who organized all the festivities in our house.  She was the one who knew a thousand stories to tell of myths and animals, who kept me close to the earth with walks stopping to show a plant that tasted sour or a mushroom to eat.

     There was a time when Julija danced through the five day long weddings in Latvia and had a string of suitors.  She won the math prizes in her school and on the way home brought the cows in for milking. 

    All those years of life and pleasure are what’s returning to me.  I am her daughter after all and I sought happiness in different ways but have found her again in the curves of the hills of our farm and the gardens she so cared for. 

 

A poem for those days.  May they live on.

 

Vistas

 

New York wrap around world,

thickets  engulf  the unsuspecting,

panic  pierces  the young.

To be an immigrant once again,

returning to childhood fears

in accented  tongues,

rhapsody  in decay.

 

It´s still there.

The river slows.

A cathedral stands  despite

endless shows of light and age.

I verify, in season,

my city is alive.

           

Perhaps the city is another,

one of ancient  folk tales,

of mother  and kin

traced to age and left behind.

What is place to exist

except  in  a dream?

 

Country cicadas  and  grasshopper  green

marked my youth. 

Snakes scared even mother

as staunch as the universe.

The country  is tractor  widths

and early morning eyes.

Say it is so, this life of shaping

rocks and dreams. 

 

The last visit

marred by dead,

once singing alive  in its core.

The body too long gone,

I wake to it dressed and plucked,

left in the snow.

Even Granny visits,

her cane  parting the clouds.

We smile and her massive  flesh

wrinkled and folded moves  on.

 

"Amsterdam, An Awareness of Aging" published in "Through a Glass Darkly" revisited

 "Amsterdam, An Awareness of Aging" published in "Through a Glass Darkly" revisited  http://www.universaltable.org/images/GLASSToC.pdf
 Last night I had a conversation with an old friend now living in Denver.  In the midst of snowstorms, too long winters, and a struggle with HIV that's lasted since I met him in the '80's he is positive about the future.  Positive?  Yes, he thinks there is a mass rasing of consciousness and awareness that will change the world.  God, I hope so.
   Myself, I'm in the midst of my own awareness of chronos that I wouldn't classify as optimistic.  In the language of astrology, I am in the midst of a Saturn transit that's touching many of my personal planets.  What does that mean?  Well, I moved from a workplace of beauty and light to a small room in a hall with a surly staff.   I'm saddled with odd bureaucratic rules at work and I'm working more than ever with a salary that seems to get lower.  My class is full of "oldsters"- my most recent student is 75 and walks with a cane.  My private student, also in her 70's, has become one of my favorite people.  After reading my first chapbook, she said she was more optimistic than I am. 
   So I remembered this essay...

Amsterdam,

An Awareness of Aging  

 

  At what point did I become the eccentric older woman traveller?  I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror in an Amsterdam shop which confirmed what I didn´t want to see.  I was wearing a big belted secondhand winter coat.  It was a Calvin Klein in my size which excited me no end when I found it, but didn´t change the fact it was neither fashionable nor very attractive.  I was in a pair of Lands End walking shoes, the very idea of which would usually make me cringe but they couldn´t have been more comfortable.  My hat was vaguely reminiscent of something my aunt might have knit, a lumpy black wool creation.  But the dead giveaway that I´d changed was I was wearing my glasses.

            For years I would never have dreamt of going out in public in glasses.  I´d always worn my contacts, morning to night however late that turned out to be.  Obviously I´d opted totally for comfort letting my eyes rest from the drying effects of contacts requiring my putting drops in my eyes periodically or else suffering the contacts sticking to my eyeballs.  Another  telltale sign of aging.

            And for this new, or rather older me, Amsterdam wasn´t the right city.  Though I love the smell of hash, a coffee shop with its offering of only coffee or pot didn´t quite fit my lifestyle. I wouldn´t be able to manage more than a couple of tokes.  The smoke hanging in the air gave me a flash of nostalgia,dorm parties with Cream on the turntable and everyone so high they no longer spoke.

            Since I´d visited Amsterdam over twenty years ago, the Red Light district didn´t thrill or impress.  It gave me a sense of hard working women which showed on their faces. Yet the contrast of the prostitutes with the matronly figures at the rail information desk and the stiff white collars in the paintings of the Dutch masters makes for a curious juxtaposition.

            I must have gotten bigger since my last trip since I just didn´t fit in the tiny staircases in the doll sized houses.  But natives were even bigger than I am.  How did they manage?  I yearned for space and not to bang into chairs in a café or knock something over with my bag.

            The herding about of tourists from one museum to the next is the largest industry in Amsterdam.  There is little chance to intermingle with natives anymore.  Tourists are given a section of a space to befoul while everyone else steers clear.  I live in a tourist town myself, Barcelona, so I´m familiar with the disdain one feels towards tourists who have made life more complicated and city streets too crowded.  In fact, in Barcelona I rarely venture downtown anymore.

            Water was so controlled in Amsterdam I never found its presence overwhelming like with the aqua alta in Venice.  Here it served as a picturesque backdrop contained by feats of engineering over the centuries.  It wouldn´t dare intrude.  I even have faith the Dutch will create another miracle like the one that saved the city centuries ago when global warming threatens. After all, land is reclaimed on a regular basis and even the train station sits on an artificial island.

            Food left me puzzled. A visit to a supermarket (a chain called hamster, why, I have no idea) revealed a wealth of fresh fruit and vegetables.  Cheese and bread were excellent and apples, the best I had in years.  But something happened to the ingredients on their way to the restaurant table.  Portions were hearty but nothing was delicious, not even ethnic food and prices were very high.  A falafel sandwich was one of my better meals in the city.

            Despite the onslaught of tourism, people were pleasant.  There was a comforting figure on the train, eating his whole wheat sandwiches and drinking from a thermos of coffee.  The desk clerk in our cheap hotel told me he wanted to talk.  Children skated on a city pond a la Hans Brinker.  A taxi driver drove up to ask if we needed to get somewhere as we were waiting for a tram at 6AM, enabling us to catch our train as the tram never showed up.   

            Fat sheep barely moved on the patches of grass between canals in the countryside.  There was so much solidity in a land built on water.  Substance and comfort were what I walked away with, the very qualities I have found in myself over the years.

Mountain Rain

     A wonderful online journal, Roadside Fiction published my story, "Mountain Rain".  It comes at a perfect time.  It is a story that confronts the unknown, what we can sometimes call a spiritual or even a synchronous event. 
    The story is set in a town, Port de la Selva, Spain, which is down the mountain from a Benedictine monastery, San Pere de Rodes.  The records of the monastery date back to 878.  It reached its maximum importance in the 11th and 12th centuries.  What suprised me was that at one point it was run by the abbot and his son.  Celibacy was not always a given in the Catholic church. 
http://roadsidefiction.com/index.php/mountain-rain-by-teresa-peipins

American Culture Revisited-Gun Violence, Corporate Greed, and Religion

American Culture Revisited-Gun Violence, Corporate Greed, and Religion




When I lived abroad the US was a beacon for me of a place where things functioned, freedoms were possible, and the standard of living was high. After several years back I’ve categorized the culture into three areas.

First is gun violence. Gun violence is so common as to be ignored. Every day in Buffalo, a medium sized city, there are at least one or two shootings. While I was working at a West side community center, two shootings took place. On another occasion, I was caught in a lockdown in administration building when I went to sign for my pay. In the 20 years I lived in Barcelona, I only remember one incident of a shooting that took place in a nearby plaza. In any case, gun violence was not at all commonplace and for the most part, I felt very safe living in a large European city.

And, why should anyone here own an assault weapon? To blow a deer to bits or shoot up a school? I’d take it even further, why weapons at all? Weapons are the last male realm of control, a very symbol of maleness. And there is the huge weapons industry propagating this ok corral mentality.

Next is corporate greed. Enron, cruel mortgage practices, the medical industry, the list goes on and on. What are CEO salaries and bonuses like? We know minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. Contrast that with Australia’s $15.96 hourly wage and low unemployment rate. The choice here has been to maintain a huge underclass dependent on government assistance for survival. This system penalizes- why take a job at minimum wage with no health benefits while public assistance at least provides health care for the family?

This leads me to health care and my limited experience with it here. The only decent attention I’ve received was at a urgent care facility. That is the only place I’ll return to if, unfortunately, the need arises. For that I pay a high rate monthly. I do have a primary care doctor (almost impossible to find one accepting new patients). The office was a dirty space, poorly organized and terribly inefficient.

Freedom of religion leads to the same issues France has been facing. At what point are the tenets of a modern society eroded by the fundamentalism of its citizens? My own beliefs are constantly challenged in my work with immigrants. We bend to accommodate but lines must be drawn. Wives beaten, marriages arranged or overruled by male family members, keepers, and so many abuses against women are part and parcel of many religions.

So I struggle on, looking for the positive and fighting the good fight.

My Year of Living Dangerously

Contact from two old friends dropped me right back into the Medellin of decades ago, the Medellin of drug lords, of violence, and the great passion of life lived in the shadows of all that intensity. Thanks to Patricia and Harold for reminding me that it was real. I was there in all of my naiveté.


Years later, it’s still almost too delicate to touch. I have rarely written about it save for a few poems. And I’m reminded of Alexandra Fuller (wonderful writer and speaker) who said you have to write with honesty. I’m not quite ready for all the stories.

How did I not know? I’d done research and read all that I could yet I arrived to teach in a binational center and was picked up in a bulletproof station wagon. Many incidents- I’ll save them for later but what remains is innocence, with the world surrounding gone mad.

And connectedness with friends. There were poetry readings, long lunches with my girlfriends, and trips to the country- returning to the city with its sparkling lights on the mountains. Love and language, beauty surrounding, and enough passion to last a lifetime. That was Medellin.



A poem from then…



Santa Fe de Antioquia



The smell of decaying fruit hangs

in the hot sun,

A green as strong

I´d never seen

in years of temperate moderation.



Ceilings beyond reach

in a room very old,

matching the inhabitants

busily fashioning

caskets out of wood,

the family trade.



Neatly stacking them

just beyond the bedroom

where I sleep in coolness,

for babies, tiny and white,

for adults several wait.



This night double church bells

announce another loss.

Bats flutter, then

rest flat

blotting out

paradise in palm trees.

When did books become a burden?

When did books become a burden?




As I sit in my bedroom every surface (even the bed) is cluttered with books. There are the books I have promised to read for various reasons (the author is coming to town, a friend has passed it on) and the ones I couldn’t resist picking up in a world where hardcovers can cost as little as a dollar and paperbacks, a mere quarter. And did I mention my kindle, crammed with classics?

Such excess has led to disdain. I avoid looking at the volumes that just a short time ago I was dying to read. There are simply too many of them. This is modern overload.

Contrast this with my years in Spain. I waited impatiently for the January sales in the oddly named “Happy Books” when I could pick up popular fiction and classics IN ENGLISH for half price. I read everything from Wilke Collins to the latest  novels. It was such a pleasure to search the books for something I might want to read. I also sent myself boxes of books from the US for more serious reading (back in the pre-Amazon days).

There was the summer I spent in Capcanes in the Priorat, a town so small even newspapers in any language weren’t available. I blew through every piece of reading material I had with me in a week and I had several more weeks to go. My friend Linda came to visit and brought a suitcase full of books. I am still grateful!

Back in Barcelona I worked as a reader in two publishing houses, Ediciones B and Grijalbo Mondadori (thanks Jill for getting me started there). There was a time when I had read every popular fiction book (before they came out). In those days too, every work submitted by any author was read and reported on. I read anywhere from 2-4 books a week. I was introduced to two genres- crime, which probably led me to write crime fiction, and biography which was surprisingly engaging.

By the time I left Europe, FNAC ( the French chain) appeared and lots of fiction in English became available. When I left behind my library of hundreds of volumes I was hard pressed to give them away.

So what happened? Where does it end? Is it social media that sucks up our time or simple overload? Everyone has a voice and there is no discrimination of what’s good or not. It just keeps coming at you.

THe New Nemesis and a poem. "Snow Clues"

The New Nemesis


No more orange alerts (for the time being at least). Our new enemy is now the purple and blue weather maps showing swirling storms with names- the latest of which is Nemo. I sit mesmerized and frightened by the massive weather systems conjoining and wreaking havoc. What’s worse than the actual storm though is the hype, the constant barrage of updates and alerts. When it comes down to the real pictures of weathermen or women standing in the snow, reality sets in and here in Buffalo, at least, it’s just one more winter day.

The hype has its effects. The day before the storm I went to the supermarket around lunchtime where the few cashiers (not expecting this) were overwhelmed. What’s up? asked the customer ahead of me. “It’s the storm, man,” was the answer.

My first year back in Buffalo, the snow still a mystery after decades away, I actually showed up at work on a snow day. Nothing happened. Of course, I’m glad to have a warning but I don’t need the fear. Winter is turning into anxiety and that’s even though I was here for the 2 major blizzards- 77 and 86- no names just the year they happened to distinguish them.



SNOW CLUES

Were there no cars

We walk the winter white world

our prints merge

with tiny animal paws,

bird wings

to create

snow clues.

Sleighs cross

soundless

the horses shake

the bells of Robert Frost.



Sparkle white

blinds,

Snow sleep

the most alluring of all.