Rain is finally coming down here on the north coast, and it looks like it’ll be coming down for the next week or so. Parker is having a bit of a hard time figuring out how to feel about that- He gets all excited to go for a walk when I get home, but then when I try to get him to go in the yard to pee he runs away because it’s raining. Same, bud. Same.
I find myself at this time of year wearing softer clothes to be cozy and comfortable at work more frequently, and listening to the “Pumpkin Spice” Spotify channel at work. The very first day that it began raining this year, I ran to my room, threw a few more blankets on my bed and burrowed in.
My goodness, am I becoming a real life version of “White Woman’s Instagram“?
My books are looking more inviting these days, I whipped through The Great Pretender by Susannah Cahalan and have been working on Humboldt Homegrown: The Golden Age by Edward Parsons, which is the fictionalized story about a guy who grew weed in Humboldt County in the 1970s. It’s a solid 600 pages and was written in 1985, but I figure if someday I’m going to do an exhibit on weed in Humboldt County, I should read the materials that are out there talking about the history- and there are only a few books out there about it. I also started (and finished)reading “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together” By Heather McGhee which was good in explaining how we get the phenomenon of white people in poverty shooting down policies that would help them and many others (expanded public healthcare, better schools, etc) because those policies would also help a smaller but still present population of people of color. I’ll write more about this in a later post.)
Still on the bookshelves are, well, a lot of books. Warmth of Other Suns, The Human Swarm, many of the things Clifford Geertz wrote, Nothing Like it in the World, which I know was written by a known plagiarizer, but I got it for free so I feel less bad about it. Two Faces of Exclusion, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Arabian Nights, The Sum of Us, God and War, Dispossessing the Wilderness, on and on and on. I’ve been doing well on not growing the collection of books to read, and have been doing well at chipping away at what I have. Lately though, I’ve been itching to get ahold of some Vine Deloria books- I read “Playing Indian” by Philip Deloria, Vine Deloria’s son, a while back and more recently finished the podcasts This Land and All My Relations which have piqued my interest in contemporary Native issues. Matika in All My Relations references Deloria’s God is Red in one episode, and when I went to look it up, I remembered hearing mentions on Custer Died for Your Sins being read in HSU’s Native American Studies classes. As I learned more about Deloria’s writing, I grew more excited.
(I admit that while writing this, I went onto eBay and finally hit the purchase button on the Deloria books and a few others I have been adding to my cart over the last few months… Time to clear out some of the shelves to make some room it looks like. I’ve since started God is Red and so far, it’s been pretty interesting. From what I’ve read so far, its a deeper dive into Native religion beginning in the 1960s American Indian Movement (AIM) and how Native traditions have interacted with contemporary forces like the Civil Rights Movement. I’ll probably write more on this later. Other books in that order include “Indians in Unexpected Places” by Philip Deloria, “The Power of Myth” by Joseph Campbell- a throwback to my Religious Studies days, “Indians and Anthropologists” by Vine Deloria Jr, “For This Land: Writings on Religion in America” By Vine Deloria Jr, “Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths: A Critical Inquiry” by Vine Deloria Jr, “Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples” by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and “The Little Book of Restorative Justice” by Howard Zehr.)
This time of year, I think of Katie Wilson.
When I was in school, I took a class called Consumerism and EcoSpirituality. The title makes it sound a lot like Hippie 101, and it being led by a wiccan who wrote her masters thesis on Burning Man didn’t help, but it’s a class I’ve come back to multiple times mentally since graduating. It took place in a partially underground classroom, with a sliver of a window that looked out on what I vaguely remember might have been a magnolia tree. The teacher, also named Katie, one time was talking about how our mental states turn inward as we head into fall and expand outward as we go into spring, as the winter is a more internal, contemplative time and spring is a more outgoing and growth oriented time. I think about that a lot to give myself a break for those days when I really just want to sit around and read while it’s cold and rainy out. Throughout the semester, she’d comment on the magnolia tree, noting when it began to grow new leaves and bloom. Part of that class included setting aside time each week to sit down and write outside about what the world looked like. I remember really enjoying that assignment, and the class in general. We spend so much time in school being in our own heads, it was a good reminder to check in on what is going on outside too.
The class was discussion and participation based, with some writing assignments here and there because something needed to go in the grade book. I admit, I don’t remember much of what happened, but that’s the same for other classes I took where there were a lot of assignments.
I wish I knew what happened to Katie Wilson- HSU gutted the Religious Studies department after I graduated and I have no idea where she went. She also taught a class called Death and (Im)mortality that was outstanding- it was in the evenings in the fall, getting out at 8 or 9 at night, long after the sun had set so I walked home in the dark, mind whirring with thoughts. It wasn’t hard to stay awake in that class- it was fascinating. It was there that I learned about the sci-fi-esque afterlife of the Mormons. I also remember seeing a particularly thought-provoking video about the Tibetan Book of the Dead that had my head spinning for at least a few hours after seeing it in class. (Turns out, the very serious narrator is Leonard Cohen, and the movie was made in 1994)
We have two flags on the front of our house that are absolutely whipping around in the high winds right now- I have a feeling they might be shredded in the morning. Parker is curled up by my feet asleep despite not getting a second walk this evening. He did get a dental chew though, and he was as excited about that with perhaps a similar amount of excitement as he expresses when he gets a pig ear.
Katie Buesch 