Springing Forward with the Wicked Witch by Barbara Ardinger

March 5, 2017March 5, 2017 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

A story for our time!!!

Barbara Ardinger El Presidente was enlarging his war against his citizens. This meant the roads were more crowded than before with refugees fleeing the capital city for safety among the farmers on the plains and up in the hills. Some of these refugees arrived, of course, at the farm of the wicked witch.

Refugees

Whenever a family arrived, the witch would put on her wickedest face and voice (she’d been practicing) and tell the children she was going to roast them and eat them with mashed potatoes and baby gravy. The children believed her for about a minute and a half, whereas their parents just smiled as each family was taken in hand by the senior refugees and led to rooms where there were new beds. The tenured refugees had (with the witch’s permission) taken charge and somehow found enough lumber to build two new rooms (lean-tos) at the side of the house…

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A Week of Gratitude (cont.)

March 3, 2017 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Each day I made a list of things for which I feel grateful, sometimes more, sometimes less. Tuesday’s list includes:

-Endless sunsets streaked with orange, vermillion, purple, lavender and colors with no name.

-An ability to sing the world’s greatest chorale music with a group of experienced singers who even occasionally sings with the symphony.

Wednesday’s list includes:

-Books I love. My favorite is “Storyteller” by Leslie Marmon Silko. I must have read her story “Yellow Woman” at least 50 times.

-The ability to write myself. I entered a flash memoir contest on Wednesday.

Today’s list includes:

-A short but fun experience with my grandson whom I picked up at school. He told me all about what he is learning in science class–he is in seventh grade. We discussed genetics and Punnett Squares. I recently explained them to some high school biology students.

-Driving my tractor, grading the steep drive down to my cliffside house. I grew up on a farm and love driving the tractor.

-Cooking dinner. Here’s the recipe:

Fillet of salmon–keta

4-5 garlic cloves, coarsely chopped

1 poblano pepper, seeded and coarsely chopped

1/2 medium beetroot, thinly sliced and then diced

Bebere to taste or other spice if you do not have this

Several bunches kale, spine removed, and coarsely chopped. I used two kinds–one green and one purple.

Saute the garlic and beetroot in olive oil until nearly cooked. Add the poblano pepper and salmon. Sprinkle a coating of bebere to cover the salmon. Saute until salmon is nearly done and pepper is cooked but still bright green. Add kale, occasionally stir, and saute until kale is slightly wilted. Serve over rice. I used basmati from Pakistan.

Note: bebere is a spice from Ethiopia. I use homemade from my Ethiopian friends who have it special made. Her blend is complex but not very hot. Some commercial blends are mostly hot.

A Week of Gratitude

February 28, 2017 / Juliana Lightle / 1 Comment

Negatives emerged lately in my life, the events in the last two posts, two good friends with health issues and a lot of pain. Nevertheless, yesterday, I started thinking of so many things for which I feel grateful. Then I said to myself, I am going to work on a week of gratitude, a week where everyday I make a list of things for which I feel grateful. Out of years of habit, I make a mental gratitude list every night as I drift off to sleep. This is more formal, a list I write down.

Yesterday’s list includes these:

-pure water from a deep well

-healthy food I cook myself

-children who live good, productive lives

-my own good health

Today’s list includes:

-a job I really enjoy in spite of paper grading tasks

-students who make me laugh and tell me they love me–who knows whether they mean it and honestly it’s ok either way

-outside chores, e.g feeding horses morning and evening. I cannot imagine life without this even when it is cold and miserable

-singing–after I post this, I will head to my weekly chorale practice. Currently, we are singing all these touching songs, poems by Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda put to music.

-taxes–crazy, I know. I recall someone once telling me he was happy to pay taxes because it meant he was making decent money and was not poor.

I Watched Movers Box Up a Life

February 22, 2017 / Juliana Lightle / 3 Comments

Saturday, February 18, 2017

I watched movers box up a life today, a life I thought left me thirty some years ago. I was wrong.

When our daughter and I cleaned out the refrigerator, we found a large pot filled with egusi stew, remnants of the last meal he cooked. I took the footlong, hand carved, wooden spoon, scraped the dry bits clinging to the sides of the silver pot. Scrubbing it clean, smells of memory flooded my nostrils–cayenne, bitter leaves. It took me ten minutes, ten memory laden minutes. Even after scrubbed and dried, the pot’s cayenne smell filled my nostrils, the distinct smell of West African food.

I watched movers box up a life today, a life I thought left me thirty some years ago. I was wrong.

Our daughter and I found papers and photos, items her father kept all these years, detailed memories of our life together. I could barely look at them, throat constricting, tears welling in the eyes of this woman who never cries. Our daughter, dismayed, told me to go outside. I walked down the quiet street, brown leaves scattered from autumn, unraked, a strange street both urban and rural inside a city of nearly half a million residents. Is this where he walked, attempting to improve his health? Was I walking in his footsteps?

I watched movers box up a life today, a life I thought left me thirty some years ago. I was wrong.

Frozen

February 5, 2017 / Juliana Lightle / 7 Comments

Two weeks ago today, the sickening news came: my daughter’s father, my ex-husband, suffered a massive heart attack while working. Rushed to the hospital, resuscitated, then open heart surgery. He never regained consciousness, not yet. He lies there, part of his brain not working, tube-fed, not breathing on his own.

She drove all night, six hours to get there. She thought they had taken her to the wrong room, unrecognizable. Last week end, I drove with her. Except for his hands, I would not have recognized him myself, so thin, so aged. How could someone change that much in the ten years since I had last seen him? She went back again late this week, returned late last night. Moved to a longterm care facility, he remains the same except he no longer even opens his eyes, no more staring into the void.

I feel frozen. This morning I delivered my grandson to my daughter–he stayed with me this trip. Checking on her father’s apartment, my daughter found his photos, some from when we were young. She showed a few to me. I stared, shocked, dismayed. My today’s to-do list just sits here. I force myself to work at it bit by bit, write two peer review assignments for a class I am taking–I do not want to disappoint, vacuum and dust one room at a time, tell myself I need to go out on this 20 degrees warmer than normal day and garden, write this blog post. I feel frozen.

He had plans neither she nor I knew about, plans to perhaps make him happier, return to the land of his birth. Will some miracle occur, will he awaken, recover? Is there some appropriate time for which we wait?

I feel frozen. When will I thaw?

Meeting Phrike: Feminist Theology and the Experience of Horror by Jill Hammer

January 25, 2017January 25, 2017 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Today, I planned to write my own blog post this evening after work. Just before I read this post, I mulled over topics, whether I wanted to share a recipe or write about so many disturbing as well as inspiring events I experienced or watched in the past week. Then today a student in one of my classes loudly questioned whether the Holocaust even occurred. This was followed by another student announcing that Jews are not people. As I read through my emails, this blog post appeared. It seemed especially telling given that experience. I refuse to tolerate comments that denigrate the religion, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference of anyone.

Feminism and Religion

Myself, I saw the numb pools amidst the shadows; myself, the wan gods and night in very truth. My frozen blood stood still and clogged my veins. Forth leaped a savage cohort… Then grim Erinys (Vengeance) shrieked, and blind Furor (Fury), and Horror (Phrike), and all the forms which spawn and lurk amidst the eternal shades.
Seneca, Oedipus (trans. Frank Justus Miller)

Horror is not a cognitive but a physiological or affective extra-discursive state of being. Not unlike the state of, say, feeling nausea, horror is a state of being, whose manifestation, based on the etymologies of the Greek φρiκη [phrike] and the Latin horror, may be described, as Adriana Cavarero writes, as “a state of paralysis, reinforced by the feeling of growing stiff on the part of someone who is freezing,” and further, through her mythological reference to the prototypical figure of horror, Medusa, as a state of “petrification”…

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The Chandravati Ramayana: A Story of Two Women by Vibha Shetiya

January 15, 2017January 15, 2017 / Juliana Lightle / Leave a comment

Although I do write many original blog posts, many times I see something that I think needs to be shared with others, something new, enlightening. This post tells a story I had not previously heard, an important story.

Feminism and Religion

vibpic Although “the” Ramayana is a fluid narrative, scholarship has traditionally recognized the Sanskrit Valmiki Ramayana as the most authoritative of Ramayanas. But recent studies have brought to light the hundreds of regional stories of Rama and Sita which are more popular with the masses. These would include Krittibasa’s Ramayana in Bengal, Kamban’s Tamil Iramavataram in South India, notably in the state of Tamil Nadu, Tulsidas’s Ramcharitamanas among the Hindi-speaking belt of northern India, and so on. But even here, a pattern seems to emerge; all the above-mentioned authors are male. Within this scenario, a rather unique text stands out, and that is Chandravati’s sixteenth century Bengali Ramayana, for its author was a woman. Even more fascinating is the double-toned nature of the narrative – through Chandravati’s own voice and through the voice of its tragic heroine, Sita.

Chandravati (ca.1550-1600) was born in a village in eastern Bengal, today in…

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You, yes, you can make a difference

January 14, 2017 / Juliana Lightle / 1 Comment

Many tell me or believe that one person, him or herself, cannot do much to change the world, to make a difference. This short movie tells about a man in northeastern India who transformed a wasteland into a forest by planting one tree at a time over many years. Now elephants, deer, and even tigers live there. Take a look for yourself. Look for the youtube video called “Forest Man”. The web address is :

It won awards at several different film festivals including Cannes.

Another bill aims to take wolves off endangered list

January 12, 2017January 12, 2017 / Juliana Lightle / 1 Comment

For a number of years I have mulled over reasons why humans seem to hate wolves considerable more than other predators. I have my own “theories”. What are yours?

Wolf Is My Soul

January 10, 2017

A gray wolf moves through forested country in winter. Credit: MacNeil Lyons, National Park Service

The new Congress wasted little time in efforts to once again remove gray wolves from the federal endangered species list.

A bill introduced Tuesday by U.S. Reps. Collin Peterson, D-Minnesota; Sean Duffy, R-Wisconsin; and Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, would overrule a federal court action and remove federal protections from wolves in the Great Lakes and mountain west.

That already happened once, but a judge’s decision in late 2014 restored federal protections after wolves spent about three years under state control.

The members of Congress, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, say wolves have recovered enough in those areas to remove protections. But wolf supporters say the wolf hasn’t recovered over enough of its original range to remove protections in the few states where it is thriving, like Minnesota and Wisconsin. Wolf supporters…

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