“I can’t wait to get back to normal.” Earnestly said. We’ve all said it in one way or another this last year.
Four of us stood in the pasture. A late winter breeze caused each of us to raise our coat collar. We’d gathered to talk about landscape practices, the need of land care, and our struggle to maintain sustainable space in a place surrounded by commodity-based farmers and ranchers. The cold slid our hands into coat pockets and hunched us over a bit.
As the phrase blew past us in the mask breeze of six-feet, she said, “I have little interest in getting back to normal.” With stocking caps and hoods pulled over our ears we searched the gray grass at our feet for “normal.” We all knew what he meant: maskless gatherings; holiday dinners with family; sitting beside the bed of our sick and dying; laughing in community; crying in community, and we all knew what she meant: too much had happened in the last year; not enough had happened in the last year; yesterday’s normal bounds of inequity.
My friend has roughly twenty years on me. His childhood was the era between the 1934 Indian Relocation Act and the ’56 Act. Moving from the Gila River Community to Los Angeles his mother hoped for the government promised better life. 1940’s South-central L.A., though, bears little in the realm of better life for a single Pima mother. As he readied for school life, the two of them boarded a bus and traveled 400-miles to the boarding school north of the reservation. Four hundred miles does not lend to weekend visits. The year came and went without mother and son hugging, kissing, or having supper.
Another friend, younger, Asian, and a pastor is asked to step aside by 2019 airport security. Her white collogues walk by as she is patted-down and asked questions.
A middle-age Black pastor friend is pulled over and questioned. He drives away without citation and arrives late for a congregational meeting.
Thousands of Toppenish Creek Valley cattle are weaned and transported to the sale yard’s fall auction. Leaving grass and mothers behind they are sold as feeder stock. Loaded into trailers they are hauled to feed lots across the west. They spend the remainder of their lives confined to non-grass (shit filled) holding pens. Twelve to eighteen month later their bodies are sold again to “processing” facilities where once high-tail romping on open range lives come to a sterile end.
We have been taught to live binary lives. Life is either normal or abnormal, right or wrong. Encouraged early to become normal and blind to life’s grays screens us to the liminal and constrains us from questioning if our lives are sustainable or good. Normal has been about fitting each person with the right set of blinders. Blinders which have us focused on our next restaurant, car, phone, or house. Blinders which prop up business profit and government power. Blinders to our natural gifts. Blinders which keep us from supporting wildlife, farms and ranchers, fishers and hunters, rural communities, and generational families. Blinders which have us living to buy the next 16-oz steak, eat double-decker hamburgers, live as if chickens only have breasts, and place bacon on hamburgers (and upon most any food item for that matter). Blinders which not only create commodities but have us become a commodity. And as commodities we live lives of institutional incarceration, border separation of mothers and children, human traffickers and trafficked, farmworker slavers and slaved, and unquestioning supporters. Souls are lost and lost is spirit.
Yet in the past is found the grounding of redemption. In the word of our ancestors we can relearn the soil, nurture a garden, and can her vegetables. Relearn our hands and become kneaders of bread. Relearn the fullness of community and gather for a picnic. Converse and revel in different thought, new thought, and imagination unlike our own. Pray the sacred, experience the natural, and to ground our lives in the native. In the word of the ancestors we find gratitude for the simple where normal is in the wonder of the full moon setting over a morning’s horizon, the crow of the cock, the bray of a donkey walking a shrub adorned path at sunrise, and in the child’s waking eyes.
Chewing the Cud 
Can certainly resonate with this post. My generation seems to be standing on to plateau that are moving in opposite directions. During the pandemic, my thoughts have repeatedly gone back to a grandmother, born in late 1800’s, married at around 15 yrs and lived to 87 yrs. Her perspective was shared with me as the youngest grandchild who was in her care much of the weeks in a two year span when I was 5 and 6. She baked bread three times a day – yeast rolls. She only finished 3 years of school, but was wise and interested in news of the day. My memory went to the times I would wake in the morning while staying with to find her sitting in her rocking chair, reading the Bible. Any reading she did was mostly out loud because she said it was the best way to learn it. She was thankful for each day and would say, “I woke up this morning with an idea of working to help people, and went to bed last night with a good feeling that I did help someone.” I watched her make the bread dough as if she didn’t even have to think about the recipe, a hand full of flour, a pinch of salt, a couple of spoons of yeast from the jar, lard from the metal pail and last, some water from the great big coffee cup my grandpa used to drink from. She would be looking off to talk to someone, or watch the birds outside the window, or call for me to get back in her sight if I wandered off. The bread was a part of her that she with which she formed a new relationship morning, noon and night. Thinking of this has been almost daily routine for me. We try to stay away from white flour, lard, and the little pinch of sugar that always got thrown in last with the lard. I’m not good at making bread, so I have substituted acknowledging the native heritage within me and others as a daily practice, like Granny’s bread. The seminar about boarding schools you referenced in an email was a part of that time for me today. Thank you for that, and for this great reflection that convinced me my Granny’s bread and her morning routine were for me redemptive normals. These reflections are always reminders to me of some natural space or time that gives the reward of memories.
LikeLiked by 1 person