Middle of Everywhere - Mary Bray Pipher [127]
Americans who have suffered find similar ways to cope. They work for worthy causes, reconnect with friends, recommit themselves to their religious faith. They decide to spend more time with family, to read all of Shakespeare, or to visit the national parks they always wanted to see. They give their money to the needy.
Resilient people tell themselves a story that gives their lives meaning and purpose. The African American and Native American communities are especially good at using proverbs and stories to build meaning. Throughout their histories, these cultures have created stories that allowed them to laugh, to learn, and to find dignity in situations of oppression and despair.
In an ideal world we would learn about healing from one another. We would draw on the wisdom from all times and places. We would be intentional in our healing. That is, we would select from all cultures that which might work for us. In an ideal world we would all be able to pray, to dance and to feast, to watch sunsets and moonrises, and to talk to each other about our pain. We would use both laughter and tears and that great antidote to despair, being useful.
We would create healing ceremonies. We would find symbols that gave meaning to our grief. We would teach each other to endure, that greatest of human strengths. I remember an old saying my mother taught me: There are three cures for all human pain and all involve salt—the salt of tears, the salt of sweat from hard work, and the salt of the great open seas. Years ago when my mother told me this, I was a teenager and I believed the reference to open seas was about the escape one could make on the open seas, the escape from family or memory. Now I believe it is about die healing power of the natural world. After my time with refugees, I appreciate even more the truth of this saying about salt.
On the eve of January 1, 2000, National Public Radio commentator Daniel Schorr named Anne Frank Person of the Century. He praised her for keeping her humanity and faith in humankind in the face of all the horrors of the Nazi experience. I was touched and pleased by his choice. Ever since I read Anne's journal when I was thirteen years old, she has been a moral beacon for me.
She had all the attributes of resilience. However, she wasn't a disembodied saint, but a real person, capable of anger, self-doubt, tears, and joy. All through her last years, up until the end, she managed to remain awake, aware, and profoundly human. Even at the end of her life, in the concentration camp she was capable of grief when the gypsy girls were led to their deaths. Patricia Hampl wrote of our yearning for this girl who embodies resilience, "We seek her still, this sane person that we long for at the end of our terrible century that tried so desperately to erase her."
Chapter 11
HOME—A GLOBAL POSITIONING SYSTEM for IDENTITY
We find ourselves, I believe, in the midst of the most massive shift in perspective that humankind has ever known. We are living in a time—and I see this all over the world—in which our very nature is in transition.
—JEAN HOUSTON
We need a psychology of place. As Einstein once said, "Everything has changed except our thinking." Right now we barely have the words to discuss what is happening to the human race. Our economy and our technology have changed much more rapidly than our conceptions about what it means to be human. In our rapidly changing world, we need research about the effects of global meld on people.
We are living in a world that is falling apart and coming together at the same time. It is both Babel and EuroDisney. All the world is becoming more like America at the same time that America is becoming more diverse. The sun never sets on MTV or Coca-Cola, and Nebraskans can shop for jicama and kimchi, listen to music from Eastern Europe, or pray in a Buddhist temple with people from Laos and Vietnam. Global citizens know Michael